


mcbeans

by snackbaskets



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dad Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Gen, Other, Trans Character, also i lied its DEFINITELY mcgenji but not for a while, background jack morrison/gabriel reyes, because. im gay and the cowboy is my favorite, can be mcgenji is you squint ???? i guess ??, i might. add more tags ??? i have no idea how ao3 works, its basically just mccree, mccree centric, should clarify the name is a joke its got nothin 2 do with actual beans or anything weird
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:49:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 98,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8300528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snackbaskets/pseuds/snackbaskets
Summary: This fic is literally just mccree with dad!gabriel pre-fall bc i am Weakill. write a more coherent summary when i know what im doing maybe





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> ive never written fic before and i cannot believe im going 2 start bc of a goddamn cowboy
> 
> however this also likely indicates i am. not great @ this

Jesse, for all intents and purposes, was not a fan of violence. Odd, considering his current company of gang members and criminals, but they were a horse he didn’t feel too keen on looking in the mouth. He could admire their (albeit shaky)sense of loyalty, and he admired the love lost for their old families, of which they were entirely disallowed to speak of. He liked that too. 

They kept him fed, and housed, and healthier than he would have been alone on a street corner. They let him do what he wanted with his money. They gave him a gun and taught him how to shoot it. A woman in her sixties with “FUCK” and “SHIT” tattooed on her knuckles gave him his first cigar and taught him how not to choke on it. A woman with glittery eyelids and painted black nails set him up with a contact for his meds, and he brought her beard oils in return. It was a gang run on favors; returned kindnesses that were truly payments for actions that were never quite free.

Jesse didn’t like violence. Didn’t mean he hadn’t fired submachine guns at the windows of tagged pickup trucks. Didn’t mean there wasn’t dead men’s blood on his hands. It only meant that he disliked seeing good friends with far too many holes in them.

So when a stray gunman, toting a shotgun in either hand, wearing a pair of kevlar yoga pants and a goddamn black hoodie like some kind of 2000-era band reject, came marching into one of their safehouses, Jesse didn’t hesitate to start shooting. He fired every bullet he had, then he fired every bullet he saw, then he threw every explosive he had, and then he threw anything he could get his hands on. The shotgun shells kept coming, bouncing off the ground like bells to the sound of some unlucky bastard’s screaming. Jesse yanked the empty gun off the dead woman next to him, and pitched for the stadium seating. He would not be afraid.

He dropped back down to his stomach and clawed his way across the floor, ignoring the broken glass that stuck through his shirt and cut at his hands. He needed a phone, and he needed it yesterday. Gunshots kept popping off next to him, and stray bullets punched holes in the old metal walls, letting in dusty sunlight. One broke a beer bottle above his head, covering him in bad booze,shrapnel, and the remains of someone’s arm. 

The safehouse was less a house, and more a once-empty warehouse now equipped with a shitty kitchenette and too-few crunchy mattresses. Old, painted over plywood made walls where there needed to be and covered holes there needed not to be. Jesse threw himself around the corner of a piece of said plywood and under a shaky countertop drilled into the wall. The kitchenette had both a drawer full of ammunition, which had already been spoken for, and a drawer full of burner phones which had not. The gunfire stopped. 

He risked half-standing to reach into the drawer before throwing his back to the wall again, three phones now stuck between his fingers. He frantically jammed buttons in an attempt to get one to turn on, but for the moment they only stared back up at him with peacefully logoed startup screens. The house was more or less silent now, the only sounds being pained groans and a single set of nearing footsteps. A rusty steak knife lay forgotten to his right, and Jesse fisted it in his one hand and pulled a bandanna over his face with the other. He would not be afraid.

He stood just enough to throw a phone over the counter, and heard it hit the floor. The footsteps continued, accompanied now by the sound of shotguns shells being loaded into the chamber. He threw the second phone. It did not hit the floor.

“Good arm,” said a low, gravelly voice. Jesse did not respond, adjusting his grip on the steak knife and glaring at the third phone, now serenely playing an ugly loading animation. “I’ll even let you pick your last words.”

“Fuck you,” Jesse replied. The footsteps stopped.

“You gonna stand up, or do I have to come back there myself?” the voice asked him. Jesse didn’t move. He took deep breath and steadied the shaking from his hand. “Disappointing,” it sighed. The footsteps began again. 

A broken bottle dripped whiskey on his shoes from atop the counter, and Jesse wrapped the neck of it in his left hand. The burner phone chirped. One of the shotguns exploded off above his head, and Jesse scrabbled back into the corner as the spray reduced the phone to scrap. His heart slammed against his chest, almost painfully as he fought to stay quiet.The gunman’s boot rounded the corner, and Jesse threw himself out from under the counter, swinging the broken bottle as he went. The gunman made a startled grunt, but ducked away, leaving the whiskey nightmare to meet empty air. He then stabbed the steak knife forward, gouging a line across the middle of the hoodie, but missing his mark in the gunman’s gut. He tried to pull his now empty left hand back to throw a punch, but the butt of a shotgun connected with his cheek before he got the chance. 

Jesse went down, hard, knocking the knife from his grip and sending him sprawling on his side on the dusty cement. He backed himself up just as fast, scrabbling upright on his ass with his back to the sinks and his face to the twin barrels of the shotguns. He would not be afraid to die. Jesse pulled a grin from behind his bandanna and looked the gunner in the eyes.

“I’ll see you in Hell,” he snarled, and waited for nothingness. 

The gunman raised an eyebrow from behind its mask, stretching over the rest of its face, save for its eyes. A grey beanie hugged the top if its head and covered its ears.

“Sound a little young to be in this business,” it commented. “Takes balls-- not that they’ve dropped yet.” Jesse leaned forward and dropped the smile from his face as fast as it came. The warehouse remained eerily silent aside his own heaving breaths. 

“What are you, fourteen?” It tilted its head then, shifting a gun at him like gesturing a hand.

“Twenty-three,”Jesse lied evenly. The gunman narrowed its eyes. 

“Yeah?” it asked again, more a threat than a question.

“Yep.” he replied. It rolled a shoulder back, moving it to rest squarely in between Jesse’s eyes.

“Deadlock’s gone,” it growled. “With the shit you all pulled, anyone left alive is going to prison, probably for life.”

“You gonna make a point, or can ya just shoot me already? Ain’t that like a mercy killing?” Jesse tilted his head as he spoke, trying to let the tension from his shoulders. The gunman wrinkled its nose, just above where the mask rested on its bridge. 

“My point is, you have two options: you go to jail separate from your friends out there with folks a whole lot bigger and stronger than you, and learn to be wallpaper at best, or you spill your guts in an interrogation chamber and you might get out of a cell before you die.”

Jesse took a moment to process. On one hand, he very much disliked the idea of prison. On the other, offers made by shadowy murderous gunmen were also far less than ideal. Why him? Was it because he was so young? They could have some kind of moral issue with it. They could also be looking to pawn off his organs on the black market. Did they make the same offer to his other gang members? Would he be the only one to defect? He swallowed, feeling a bead of sweat itch across his forehead from under the shotgun. 

“You make this offer to all your hostages, or am I just real special?” Jesse beamed as he said it, raising an eyebrow. His charm worked sometimes when he asked for stale donuts, and this was, essentially, the same. Almost. The gunner only glared, pressing the barrel more squarely into his forehead.

“Plan on making a decision?” they growled.

“Is dyin’ an option? Because that’s beginning to sound alright.”

“No.”

“Damn.”

Jesse looked over his shoulder to the stained wall behind him, and leaned to his side to see past the figure standing before him. He took in the sight of his fellows sprawled out on the floor, some moving, some not. He wondered if he could scale a prison wall.

“Well now, it seems I ain’t got much choice,” he sighed, shrugging his shoulders and leaning back on his arms. “Unless you’ve changed your mind on the ‘death’ option.”

“Good choice,” the gunman said, but did not remove the gun from his head. Instead they used a free hand to grab what looked like a silver flare gun from their equipment belt. Jesse opened his mouth to ask, but before he could do so, they aimed it at his chest and pulled the trigger, sending a shiny dart to land in the meat of his shoulder. He choked out a small sound as he felt the stony pull of sedatives drag him under.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> heres. more  
> introducing Dad as dad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cannot BELIEVE yall r as deep in this hell as i am
> 
> theres still more ive got written but im gonna. revise it. alot,
> 
> also the formatting here is weird bc i Have No Idea What I'm Doing

Jesse awoke with the cold metal of handcuffs around his wrists and the discomfort of a metal chair under his ass. He groaned. The length of chain between the cuffs threaded under a ring welded onto the table, effectively pinning him in place. His bandanna hung around his neck, damp and warm from where he’d been breathing on it. The most distressing, however: his hat was missing. He looked up.

A generic looking agent sat across from him, presumably male, with downy blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. He dressed in a white t-shirt, linking his hands on the table and staring Jesse down. Nice, lightly tanned and muscled arms followed them up to square shoulders and a wide chest. Jesse raised his eyebrows.

“Jesse Mccree,” the man said, calling his attention back upwards. Jesse grinned, quirking an eyebrow and leaning back in his seat, urging the cold metal to wake him up. He ached.

“Howdy,” Jesse said to the man’s chest. The agent’s face reddened as he cleared his throat, sitting back in his own chair and opting instead to cross his arms.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked, staring Jesse down. Jesse stared right back.

“Either you’re sendin’ me to jail, or you’re friends with Shotguns,” he drawled. The agent furrowed his brow. “In which case, you expect me to up and start squealin’ like a pig.”

“You are here for interrogation,” the agent replied slowly, as if he was trying to clarify that Jesse actually knew what he meant. “We need any and all of the information about the Deadlock Gang you have to share, including that about yourself.” Jesse rolled his shoulders in his seat and flipped the greasy hair from his face. There was sand in his boots. 

“Well,” he began. “Since my reputation seems to precede me,” he looked down at the wanted poster left on the table. “I don’t much need to introduce myself. I’m twenty-three, pisces, I like long walks in the desert, and I’m a hand model in my spare time.” He punctuated the last bit by wiggling his fingers in the agent’s direction, who narrowed his eyes again.

“I’m not quite sure you understand the gravity of your situation,”

“I don’t.”

“But we operate from a very high-profile organization that could really use your help, Mr. Mccree,”

“Could it now?”

“And we would be happy to award your cooperation with a good word in on your case.” he finished, now leaning forward towards Jesse, head inclined downwards but blue eyes set on his brown ones. “So I would very much appreciate if you did not lie to me.” Jesse grinned again, more teeth than smile.

“I’m sure you would.”

This went on for what must have been an hour or more before the agent gave up and made for the door, leaving Jesse alone in the empty stone room, a pane of one-way glass to his right. He sighed and quietly wished they’d offered him water or a bathroom. When no one returned in the next few minutes, he simply laid his head back on the uncomfortable chair and closed his eyes.

-

Jack quietly closed the door behind him before exhaling grandly and wiping his hands down his face.

“He’s a little shit,” Torbjorn growled from where he sat at the long desk mounted under the pane of glass, computer chair jacked high and a bag of obscure snacks within arms’ reach. “I can go show ‘im some respect, if you want.” 

“No,” Jack groaned from behind his hands. “We shouldn’t hurt him.”

“You want to.”

“Only a little.” 

“Some golden boy you are,” Torbjorn guffawed, turning his chair around. “Reyes, can’t you go scare ‘im into talking?” Jack dropped his hands from his face and held out his arms between the two.

“No, Gabe.”

Gabriel shifted on his feet, recrossing his ankles where he leaned against the wall.

“Wasn’t gonna,” he growled. Jack sighed and dropped his arms to his sides, slumping against the door. 

“I know,” he pushed a hand through his hair. “Could you try talking to him, though? You're better at this than I am.”

Gabriel snorted. “He’s a kid, Jack.”

“He’s a criminal, not a child,” Jack snapped back, staring icily at the other man. The argument was not a new one. Gabriel furrowed his brow and glared back at him. Torbjorn shifted in his seat.

“I’ll be goin’ on then, I think,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and making for a halfhearted stretch. Jack stepped away from the door, but otherwise didn’t respond. 

The two continued to glower silently at one another before being interrupted by the suspect in question.

“Er, can I have my hat back?” Deadlock asked, voice tinny over the microphone. He fidgeted with his feet under the table, clearly uncomfortable. “Y’all take five or somethin’?”

Gabriel raised his eyebrows at Jack.

“A grown-ass man,” he said, stepping off of the wall. “Clearly.” He moved to open the door, Jack quietly placing a hand on his arm as he passed. Gabriel glowered at him, but did not pull away.

“You aren’t going to, ah, hurt him, are you? I kind of told his lawyer he’d arrive unharmed.” Gabriel stared him down. Jack removed his hand, pulling at the hair on the back of his neck. “Right, right, yeah. Stupid question.”

He shoved open the observation room door and made for the evidence locker down the hall before returning, passing the door (and Jack, still visible through its tiny window), and nearly throwing open the heavy steel of the interrogation room’s door. Deadlock startled as he entered, Gabriel violently throwing the hat in his direction without looking up. The kid scrabbled in awe for a moment at the sight of it in his hands, visibly relaxing with the fabric beneath his fingers. Gabriel threw himself into the opposing metal chair, making it shriek across the stone floor as he landed. The kid flinched, and he reveled in the thought that Jack did the same.

“You supposed to be the bad cop?” Deadlock asked, hands twitchy on the brim of the hat. 

“Thought you said you wanted less time in prison,” Gabriel growled. The kid’s eyes widened as he made the connection, then turned indignant.

“You shot me!” he yelped.

“With a fucking tranquilizer,” Gabe snapped back. Deadlock closed his mouth with a soft click. Gabriel picked up the wanted poster and turned it over in his hands.

“Jesse Mccree,” he read aloud. 

“That’s me,” Deadlock replied. Gabriel could hear his leg bouncing under the table. Or, more accurately, could hear the clink of the spurs on his boots as he did so. 

“Stop bouncing,” he snapped. Deadlock stopped. “Now, you gonna actually answer me when I talk, or are you gonna lie to me? I will know.”

“Sure thing,” he eked out, grimacing into an almost-smile. He was scared. 

“What was Deadlock doing out in fuckin’ Colorado?” he asked. The kid looked up as if surprised.

“Oh. Uh, there was supposed to be another gang coming through with drugs sometime,” he said. “Set up a safehouse out there to snag territory n’ all that.” 

“Which gang?”

“‘Fraid that one’s above my paygrade.”

“Then who was in charge?”

“Of me? The branch leader, Montego. Dunno who runs her. Can’t ask.”

“Why?”

“Cause I’m wearin her, thanks to you.” The last part was said with no small amount of venom. Gabriel steamrolled over him.

“What do you know about the command chain?”

“Know that it’s run by one person and a deputy,” Deadlock said, looking to the ground in concentration. “Dunno who it is now, gets turned over so often.”

“How long were you involved?”

Deadlock stopped for a moment, fingers stalling on the brim of the hat, considering. Gabriel raised an eyebrow.

“Three ‘n a half years,” he responded, slowly. 

“Right. How old are you, kid?” Gabriel asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Said I was twenty-three, didn’t I?”

Gabriel narrowed his eyes, staring him down. To his surprise, Deadlock didn’t flinch, but Gabe could clearly see the line of sweat running down his brow, still pocked with a mass of acne. The beard he seemed to be trying for still looked soft with adolescence. His shoulders were too big for the rest of him, arms too long.

“Wanna try that again, niño?

Deadlock swallowed. Gabriel lifted an eyebrow. The kid looked away. “I’m… twenty-three…,” he said, slower this time. 

He waited. Shifted back in his chair, rolling his shoulders idly. A full minute went by.

“Seventeen,” Deadlock mumbled. Gabriel exhaled, shaking his head. Fucking seventeen. Smeared with someone else’s brains on his cheek, his own blood caked dry on his hands.The room remained silent as Gabe chewed the inside of his cheek. Deadlock quietly cleared his throat and opened his mouth to speak, looking up with sheepish eyes in the children’s universal askance of ‘am I in trouble.’

“You want a job?” Gabriel cut him off. Something thudded softly behind the one-way glass. Deadlock stared back at him. 

“What?”

“You wanna work with us? With Overwatch. Blackwatch. Whichever.”

Deadlock had made a choked sound at the mention of Overwatch, and now just sat dumbly, blinking open-mouthed up at him. “You’re...serious?” he asked, hesitantly.

“As the grave, kid.”

He stared down at the hat in his hands, then up the the one-way glass, then to the handcuffs at his wrists. He frowned. “What do you want from me?” he squinted, suspicious.

“Nothing. You ran a gang, you sold them out. You already paid.”

It was then the door opened, Jack leaning in with a mildly desperate look in his eyes. Gabriel got up before he could speak and made for the door.

“Can I get a damn second to think about it?” Deadlock yelped, startled.

“You have until I get through the door.”

“Wait--” Jack squawked.

“Yes,” Deadlock blurted. “Er, if that’s….alright.”

“Good answer,” Gabriel said, shoving Jack back through the door with one hand, and pulled it shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @any1 who left kudos/commented: im crying, my crops r flourishing, ive never felt so alive, thank u, im in love,


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DRAMA.....AND ALSO DAD GABE STRIKES AGAIN.,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOO..,., BOY.., THIS TOOK AWHILE..MY BAD.,
> 
> SORRY ABT THAT;

“What the _fuck_ , Gabriel?”

Jack paced back and forth along the hallway, not quite having made it into the observation room. Or anywhere beyond the door, for that matter. “You invited him to join Overwatch?”

“I thought you’d be happy. I’m trying to give him a second chance.”

“He’s a criminal!”

Gabriel drew himself upright, arms crossed. “He’s a fucking child, Jack.”

“A ‘child’? He’s killed people! He’s ruined lives!”

“That shit don’t happen to kids with good options!”

“Yes, it does!”

Gabriel jammed a finger at the door. “Not to ones like _that_.”

“What do you know about his life? What do you know about the way he behaves--he could be faking!”

“And?”

Jack blinked at him, stunned. “And? What do you mean and?”

“I mean _and what does that matter_? He still deserves a chance.”

“He _got_ a chance! His chance was to _not fucking shoot somebody_ , Gabriel!”

“How do you know he did, huh? ‘ _What do you know about his life_ ’?”

“He broke the law!”

“So you’d rather see him rot in a jail cell? See him die 30 years early without anyone giving a damn?”

Jack stuffed his fingers through his hair. “Yes! Ugh, no! No! That won’t happen!”

Gabriel threw his arms outward, actively yelling, now. “He’s seventeen years old, Jack! He wears spurs on his shoes! And you think prison will fix everything? He’ll get eaten alive in there!”

“You don’t know that!”

“ _Yes_ , I fucking do! So do you! You aren’t stupid--stop fucking acting like it!”

“You can’t just let him walk, Gabriel! He’s a danger to society!”

Gabriel slammed a fist into the cement wall, feeling the plaster crack beneath his knuckles, teeth bared. “He’s a _product_ of society, Jack. Abuse, violence--those are _taught_.

“Besides,” he snarled. “I don't _intend_ on letting him walk! If Overwatch won’t take him, Blackwatch will! He’ll be on your fucking ‘ _straight and narrow_ ’! Isn’t that what you want?”

Jack ripped his hands from his head, pulling a fistful of blonde hairs with them. “Not like this! Not for someone who doesn’t deserve it!” Gabriel’s face darkened in rage. “He tried to kill you! You’ve talked to him for 30 minutes, at most! He’s done nothing-- _nothing_ \--to deserve your kindness!”

Gabriel’s fingers snapped around Jack’s wrist, jerking him forward to force their eyes to meet. “You don’t decide what I do or don’t do, Morrison,” he growled. Blue eyes burned into his own. “And you sure as hell don’t decide how I feel.”

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Gabriel cut him off. “And you know what? Fuck you. He’s Blackwatch. My division, my choice. Tough shit.”

He let go of Jack’s wrist and spun away, stalking down the hallway. He’d get the papers from Upstairs himself, goldilocks be damned. Jack scrabbled after him. “Gabriel, I’m not trying to decide how you feel--”

“I know you're not trying to,” he snapped back. “Good intentions.”

“I just want to keep you-- all of us-- safe.” Jack’s voice cracked. Gabriel kept walking.

“We can take care of ourselves. Overwatch isn’t a daycare, and you sure as hell don’t run it.”

“I know that, I just--” he heard Jack angrily tear at his hair again, inhaling shakily. “Gabriel, look at me, dammit!”

He turned. Jack was hunched half-over his middle, hands reaching. He was pale and shaking, stress pulling at the corner of his eyes. His fingertips were bloody. The roots of his tousled hair were pink.  
“I’m sorry,” he croaked. “It’s just-- I--he scares me. Him taking advantage of you, the good in you. Turning it against you. It scares me, Gabe.”

“My problem, not yours,” Gabriel reminded him, meeting Jack’s too-wet eyes. “I get you _mean_ well, Jack. I do. But this _isn’t your choice_. I’m not a fucking orchid, okay? I can take care of myself, and my division. Everyone in Overwatch, Blackwatch, they didn’t join needing a white knight.”

Jack sagged, wrapping his arms around his middle. “We can’t even talk about this?”

“Not now. Not while I’m pissed and you’re pissed and there’s a kid in the interrogation room.”

“But--”

“Decision’s made, Jack. Later.” Gabriel wiped a hand down his face, sighing. “I promise.”

A moment of silence. The only sound was their breathing, slightly labored from having been shouting. Jack’s was shaky. Gabriel’s was less so. They stood there, on opposite ends of the hallway, unmoving. A drop of blood slipped from Jack’s hairline, and Gabriel resisted the urge to wipe it away. Jack scrubbed it off a moment later, grimacing. Gabriel didn’t move.

Finally, Jack looked up at him, and he backed away. “Okay.” Silence. “I’ll let you go, then.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

He paused, looking back at Gabriel, rubbing his arms. “I love you,” he croaked.

Gabriel billowed out a breath, pushing his beanie off his head. “Yeah. I love you too. We will talk about it, Jack. Soon, just--”

“Not now?”

He smiled weakly. Jack didn’t return it. “Not now.”

Jack nodded slightly, then quietly turned and disappeared down the hall. Gabriel leaned back against the cold wall, pulling his beanie into his right hand and scrubbing at his head with the other before putting the grey hat back in its place. He debated for a moment on what to do. He felt too high-strung to talk to Upstairs, going into interrogation with his current state would spook the kid, leaving him in there would be a dick move. He walked into the observation room, instead.

The bag of Torbjorn’s snacks still sat on the counter, opened down the seams and flattened out into an impromptu plate. Gabriel snagged one from the little pile remaining and wrinkled his nose. They tasted dusty.

Deadlock sat frozen in the chair beyond the glass, carefully tilting his head to the door. Gabriel groaned. He’d heard them arguing, then.

“Disengage the cuffs, Athena.”

She complied, the cuffs popping open with an inaudible noise. Still too quiet to be picked up by the mic. Deadlock jumped and recoiled as soon as they did so, pulling his hands to his chest and rubbing at his wrists, looking around.

“Anybody still out there?” he asked the ceiling.

“Yeah,” Gabriel replied. The kid jumped at the noise, staring bug-eyed at the speakers on the wall.

Deadlock stood up, a little shakily, and set his hat back onto his head. “You, ah...you all alright? I...I heard yelling.”

Gabriel took his finger from the button and sighed, before pressing it back down. “Yeah. You didn’t hear anything on what the yelling was about.”

“Well, I--”

“No, you didn’t.”

Deadlock closed his mouth. He looked down at his hands, one still loosely held around his wrist. “I ain’t joining Overwatch, am I?”

Gabriel stared at his own hands: one dusted yellow with seasoning, the other still pressed on the button to speak. “No, you’re not joining Overwatch.”

The kid’s shoulders drooped.

“You’re welcome in Blackwatch, though.”

Deadlock looked up at the speaker again. “Blackwatch?”

“My division. We do the dirty work: interrogations, cleanup, small-town operations. Gang stings.” Deadlock flinched. “Stuff that doesn’t get press, much. Not hero work.”

There was a long beat of silence. “You still there?” Deadlock said softly.

“Yeah.”

Silence again. The kid inhaled; Gabriel saw it more than heard it. “I gonna have to kill anyone?”

Gabriel rolled his thumb and forefinger together. Some salt fell between them. “Sometimes.”

He fidgeted. “Innocent people?”

“Not if I can help it.”

The silence lasted for more than a few minutes, this time. Deadlock had settled his back to the wall across from the door, and the window. He didn’t look at either. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’ll be one of your Blackwatch.”

Gabriel paused for a moment. “You sure?”

“Should I not be?”

“Up to you, isn’t it?”

“Jail ain’t much of an alternative.”

“Fair.”

The silence stretched out again. “So what now?” Deadlock asked.

“What do you want me to call you?”

He paused. When he spoke, his response was slow, almost cautious. “Just what’s on the poster.”

Gabriel nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. “Okay.” Silence. “You hungry?”

“What?”

“Been awhile since you ate. We brought you in more than 24 hours ago. You want something to eat?”

Deadlock shuffled his feet. Hesitated. “If you’ve got anything.”

Gabriel took his hand from the button and made for the door, grabbing the pile of Torbjorn’s snacks on the way. He closed the observation room, and opened interrogation. The kid jumped, but upon seeing the bag, cautiously wandered over to the open door. Like a horse. Or a dog, because why the fuck did he think ‘horse’.

“There’s these, but they’re shitty. Something Swedish. There’s better food in the kitchen, but these are yours if you want some.”

Deadlock didn’t hesitate in taking the bag. He stuffed some into his mouth, and immediately recoiled. “Ugh, Christ.”

“I told you.”

“Weren’t kidding.” He didn’t stop eating, though.

Gabriel walked down the hallway, and after a moment of hesitation he heard Deadlock follow. When Gabriel didn’t stop him, he spoke. “Where we goin’?”

“Kitchen. Gonna make you eat something, and wash your damn hands before they get infected.” Deadlock looked down, seasoning dust stuck to his fingers. He barely came to Gabriel’s height, maybe an inch taller.

“Oh.”  
The silence returned, born more from the kid shoveling food into his mouth than anything else. “I’m Reyes.” Gabriel hesitated. “Blondie is Morrison.”

Deadlock glanced at him. “Morrison’s got nice arms,” he mused. The bag was nearly empty, now.

Gabriel looked back at him, eyebrow raised. Deadlock turned pink at the ears. “What? He does.”

Gabriel allowed himself to chuckle now, shaking his head. “Yeah, he does,” he conceded. Deadlock choked on snack powder. Gabriel grinned.

“Welcome to Blackwatch, Mccree.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: this is the 4th draft of this chapter bc im Awful @ pacing
> 
> also if anyve yall know how to turn off the notes so that you dont see EVERY chapters notes on EVERY chapter id. appreciate the info


	4. 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS TOOK. FAR TOO LONG AND ITS STILL SHORT
> 
> IM STILL BAD AT PACING

Mccree had followed Gabriel down to the kitchens about an hour ago, lagging a few feet behind him and ogling the quiet base with wide eyes. Grand Mesa wasn’t a great point, by any means--having stone walls and few windows, particularly in its lower levels. Not to mention the state of the tech, which was ancient comparatively to that in Sweden or Gibraltar. Then again, not much happened around Grand Mesa, aside from gang activity and small-town heists, but those were managed in the main building above. Everything smelled faintly of wet dirt in the basements. Upstairs smelled like pine cones. Still, the plain stone floors and weathered directional lettering on the walls seemed to be enough for the kid to find interesting. 

Gabriel rifled through the beaten particle board cabinets of the basement kitchen, tipping over forgotten tins of SPAM in the hopes of finding one with a due date that was still viable. The closest he found was June, labeling the can to have expired three months previously, four years ago. He put the SPAM back. The fridge fared better, yielding a plastic tub of sliced ham that didn’t smell too odd, and a block of cheddar cheese that was entirely usable after he cut away the spots of mold on the surface. The bread might have been stale. It might have been very fucking stale. It wasn’t moldy, though, so he used it anyway. Mccree, at first, had only stood beside the doorway, fidgeting, but otherwise silent. After Gabriel made no attempt to instruct him or advise otherwise, however, he started to wander the little room.  
It wasn’t built to be a mess hall, by any means, but rather as a kind of break lounge for those working in the basements, be in it records, interrogation, or otherwise. It was made for convenience, to maximize productivity and minimize excess resource drain. 

Gabriel dropped the newly-made sandwich on a (mostly) clean plate, where it landed with a dense thud. It wasn’t pretty, by any means, but it was better than nothing, and especially better than whatever the hell Torbjorn was eating earlier. The sandwich slid over the plate as he lifted it, spilling crumbs and scratching over the smooth surface like it had been toasted, which it hadn’t. He put the plate on the table. “Sit down, kid.” 

At the sound of his voice, Mccree startled from where he stood at the other side of the little room, examining the crude carvings and nicks made in the wood doorframe. He came to the table and took a chair that creaked as he sat down. Gabriel pulled a lukewarm water bottle, still in the bulk plastic packaging, from beside the broken toaster oven and turned back to him. 

Mccree sat at the setting furthest and across from him, with his back to the doorway and his chair not entirely pushed in. Gabriel deposited the water bottle beside the plate, and pushed both the rest of the way over to where Mccree sat. The boy cautiously pulled both closer to his person, glancing first at Gabriel and then to the food before him. 

Gabriel leaned back against the countertop and shrugged. “It’s not exactly fine dining, but it’s better than anything else down here. Eat.” A moment passed, in which Mccree still did not move. Gabriel turned away. He dug about in the cabinets for a moment more until he found a dented red teapot, filled it with tap water--it didn’t leak, luckily enough-- and set it on the stove. The sandwich made a noise as it was lifted from the ceramic; like the sound produced by running a finger over the lip of a dry glass. The ceramic noise. 

“What’re you making?”

Gabriel didn’t turn away from the stove as he spoke. “Coffee.” The instant grains in the container were clumped from years left unused. “Finish your water and you can have some.” From behind him, Mccree continued eating. A slightly tense, but otherwise comfortable silence settled over the room, broken only by the crunch of the bottle being picked up and set down on the table, and the muted clacking of a plastic spoon stirred against a cracked mug. 

Gabriel pulled out the chair behind him and settled across from Mccree, who was still fighting his way through the dry sandwich at speeds that were both impressive and frightening. He sipped his coffee. Instant grains stuck uncomfortably in his throat when he swallowed, but he tried to ignore it. From there, he ran his fingernail over the crack in the mug, just to feel the catch of the nail up his arm. He needed to trim them. 

“What?” Mccree asked. Crumbs stuck to the thin fuzz over his chin. The sandwich was gone. Gabriel folded his hand over his forearm to stop himself from fidgeting over the mug.

“What, what?”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to finish your water. What do you want?”

The boy hesitated. Glanced at the bottle, and back to Gabriel. “What’s so important about the water?”

Gabriel reached down to the side of his belt, where another silver tranq bullet waited. Two of them, actually. He set the silver shell on the table, and rolled it to the other side. “The tranquilizers make you dehydrated. You’ve also been living in a metal-paneled warehouse in the desert for, what did you say? Three weeks? Whatever.” He pointed at the glass, now half-empty. “Drink up before you make yourself sick.”

Mccree eyed him warily, but finished off the water nonetheless. “Happy now?”

Gabriel sipped from his mug again. More coffee grounds stuck to his throat. “Sure.” 

Mccree eyed the plate. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Do you want another sandwich?”

He paused. “Can I have another sandwich?”

Gabriel shrugged, and jabbed a thumb to the fridge. “Wouldn’t have offered if you couldn’t. I’d go easy on the ham, though. It smells a little.” He wrinkled his nose. “Old.” 

The kid got up, taking the plate with him. He warily edged around Gabriel, who made no move other than to slowly take another sip of his impossibly shitty coffee. He could barely breathe around all these fucking coffee grounds. “This coffee fucking sucks,” he mused. The fridge door opened.

“Doesn’t coffee just suck by default?” A few objects rattled as they were pushed aside. The cold air made the hair on Gabriel’s arms stand up.

“Not good coffee.”

The door closed. “If you say so.” The plastic tupperware lid on the ham popped as it opened. Gabriel took another sip of coffee. “This ham ain’t right.”

“I told you.” The refrigerator door closed. “You don’t have to eat it. I think there’s some granola in one of the cabinets, if no one’s got to it yet. I could probably find something else if you want.” He turned back in his seat, casually throwing an arm over the back despite the creaking wood’s protests.

Mccree looked up from the ham and balked at him. “I’m still gonna eat it.” He shoveled a handful of ham slices into his mouth as if to prove his point.

It was Gabriel’s turn to recoil, now. “Christ. Slow down at least, you’re gonna make yourself sick.”

Mccree glanced down at the ham tub and back up to Gabriel, frowning. He looked out of place crowded up against the countertop, gangly and dirty, hunkered over the ham like some kind of starving animal. Which is to say, he looked perfectly akin to every other agent Gabriel had encountered in the kitchens at 3 AM. Mccree swallowed. It didn’t even look like he chewed his food, what the fuck. “No I’m not.”

“Right, yeah. You definitely not gonna feel like shit in an hour.”

Mccree stuffed another few slices of ham in his mouth and forced them down the same, grimacing. His teeth were crooked. Gabriel made a mental note to make sure he got floss sticks. He shuffled the ham in his hands and shrugged. “Sounds like a future problem.”

Gabriel snorted and turned right-ways in his chair, again facing the doorway and now crumb-littered side of the table. He took another sip of his coffee, now lukewarm and somehow worse, and laid his head back against his seat, eyes closed. “Sounds like a brilliant way to wind up in the med bay.”

From behind him, he heard the quiet shuffling of Mccree’s leather boots against one another, followed by the quiet clicks of the spurs on his shoes. The creak of the chair across from him was soon to follow. Gabriel opened his eyes. Mccree stared back at him, ham still held close to his chest.

“Y’all really got a med bay? Like, with real doctors?”

Gabriel pushed aside the mug of coffee sludge at his side and sat up. “Yeah? The one here isn’t fantastic, but we’ll get you fixed up, if that’s what’s bothering you. I just thought you wanted to eat first.” He furrowed his brow in concern. “We can go now, if you want.”

Mccree glanced down to his hands, now covered in ham juice, and back to Gabriel. “Huh? Oh, nah, they ain’t botherin’ me. I’ve had worse.” Gabriel’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. Seventeen. Mccree peeled another ham slice from the tub and spoke while he chewed on it. “I just wondered. I mean, I figured, ‘Overwatch ain’t small, it’s gotta have doctors somewhere, right?’” He shrugged. “Didn’t really want to ask, before.”

Gabriel snorted. “Rotten ham changed your mind?”

“Don’t think it’s quite rotten, yet. Kinda fucky, but not rotten.” He stuffed another slice into his mouth as he spoke. Only a few remained. “But yeah, pretty much. You fed me and you ain’t even stabbed me once yet. You’re damn near my best friend about now.”

Gabriel forced himself to ignore the discomfort writhing in his guts. The coffee wasn't helping. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, Overwatch has doctors. Our best medical station is out in Sweden.” 

Mccree stilled, final slice of ham halting halfway to his mouth. “Sweden? Like, the country?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” he breathed. The ham slice, like those before it, disappeared into the teenaged bottomless pit. 

“Yeah.”

The ham tub popped as it was shut. Mccree wiped his hands on his jeans. “Don’t use your clothes as a towel, they’re filthy,” Gabriel commanded him. Mccree looked back up to him as if he’d been caught misbehaving, wide eyed and sheepish. “Wash your damn hands in the sink.” He did as he was told.

“When you’re done, we’re going down to pick you up a uniform.” Gabriel stood as he spoke, pouring what remained of his caffeinated sludge down the drain as Mccree scrabbled out of his way. “You won’t be in Blackwatch’s system for a few days, at least, and walking around as you are isn’t exactly a great idea.” 

Mccree glanced down as his bloody shirt, torn jeans, and denim jacket, which was patched across the shoulders to read ‘Deadlock’ in blocky lettering. He frowned.

“You can keep the hat.”

Mccree followed him out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEAH NO THE PACING WAS STILL PRETTY BAD HERE IM REAL SORRY YALL /HOPEFULLY/ ILL GET BETTER ABT THAT
> 
> ALSO I KNO THE CHARACTERIZATIONS R KINDA SPOTTY N ALL OVER THE PLACE ITS BC I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IM DOING MY APOLOGIES


	5. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took So Gotdamn Long yall but HERE U HAV IT: POOR WRITING #5
> 
> jess is. a very Anxious boy and hates showers

Reyes was nice. He was a little bit of an ass, but that attitude seemed reserved for Morrison, for the time being. To Jesse, he was nice. 

What the fuck. 

He’d met maybe five people in his life that were just _nice_. He knew there had to be more out there, somewhere, but not for him. People weren’t just _nice_ to Jesse Mccree. Nor was anyone just generous. It didn’t happen.

And yet, Reyes had pulled him out of Deadlock by the scruff of his neck, taken him to a place with a roof over his head, had given him food, and now a _uniform_ , and asked nothing in return.

Yet.

Jesse assumed that would come later. That he would find out Blackwatch was twice as dirty as Deadlock ever was, that every agent who joined was bloody and criminal, and that it had a staff turnover rate higher than a small town pawn shop. That he’d die a part of it, and no one would ever know he lived at all.

For now, though, Reyes just gave. Gave him water, and food, and four gummy vitamins (three months stale), and walked him down to a meager armory. Like every other room downstairs, it was made of plain stone, and smelled like feet. Unlike every other room, it had clean, chromed closets and safes, and a wall rack of guns--dozens of them--safely tucked behind a metal grate. Two of said chrome closets faced each other on opposite ends of the room, one with a round, grey-and-gold emblem on the face, and the other red and grey. A painted skull rested in the middle of the second. That was the one Reyes opened.  
In it were stacks of folded uniforms, arranged by size. They were, predictably, all black, save for what he assumed was the Blackwatch emblem on the bicep, same as the closet doors.

“Go for a small or medium,” Reyes advised.

Jesse grabbed a medium. It would probably be too big on him still, bagging around his armpits and making him sweat. Sweat more than usual. But it wasn’t hand-me-down to the point of being threadbare, and it wasn’t covered in various body fluids or bits. It was a uniform. As in, every Blackwatch agent had one. And they were all like this. Padded. Warm. New. 

What the _fuck_.

He held the shirt by the shoulders and let it unfold from his arms. 

“It’s stretch material,” The commander informed him from where he stood in front of the gun rack, not looking up from where he was presumably checking the armory’s access logs on the blue datapad in his hand. Presumably, an agent named ‘Donahall’ had recently taken a rifle. Presumably, this same Donahall had repeatedly written their name on the stock. Presumably, too, Reyes was sending them a short message that read “stop writing your name on the rifle. i will give it to kvonch and nobody wants that.” Or so he presumed. Jesse could very clearly read the holopad. 

He forced himself to focus on the shirt again. The material was spongy and elastic, kind of like the fabric of leggings, and it reached along when Jesse tugged at it. He pinched the sleeve in his fingers and pulled it apart, quietly marveling at how much give it had, how far it could stretch. When he let go, it returned the the same shape it was before. The same was true of the stomach, and the chest, and the legs, which were separate and, for the moment, piled up on a nearby crate while he inspected the shirt. He reached into the collar and found the inside of it not fleecy, or _soft_ , exactly, but not quite _silky_ either. Thick, bulging pads were sewn over the surface over the chest and biceps, the same to be found over the fronts of the thighs and separately, the knees of the pants. He ran his hands over the mesh(?), prodded at them experimentally, and found them not completely solid. Like thick foam, maybe.

Reyes did not look up from his very readable datapad as he spoke. “Shock absorbent gel. Won’t really stop a bullet, but it’ll slow one down.”

Jesse jabbed a knuckle into the padding. It reminded him of the sludge made from cornstarch and water, malleable and soft if he slowly dug his thumbs into it, but rigid if forced. Clever design.   
He pinched the material of the sleeves between his fingertips again. What little remained of his nails left tiny indents in the surface that quickly faded away when his hands drew back. The spongy fabric poked out from between his fingers when he squeezed it in his fist, cool and smooth against his skin. Like it would be chewy. It made a very quiet, synthetic noise as he dragged a finger over the surface. He absolutely did not want to put it in his mouth. Not in the slightest. 

Regardless as to whether or not he’d just covertly bitten the sleeve of the uniform, he’d decided. He’d do anything to get this outfit. Closer inspection of the pants revealed a set of belt loops for a thigh holster. All over the damn thing, he just kept finding pockets. Everywhere. It was fantastic. He would eat dog food for this uniform. Anything.

“You’re gonna have to hit the showers before you put that thing on. It’s not doing you any good if you’re still covered in shit.”

Almost anything.

“What?” Jesse turned around, uniform folded sloppily in his arms.

“Showers,” Reyes repeated. “You’re filthy.”

Nope. Not showers. Not happening.

Jesse shifted on his feet. “I ain’t that bad.”

Reyes raised an eyebrow and pointed at his head. “There’s someone’s tooth in your hair.”

He pulled off his hat and ran his fingers through greasy brown locks. A bloody tooth fell into his hand. “No there’s not.”

“Kid, I swear to God,” Reyes said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I get that you’re stressed. You’re in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people, and you don’t know what the fuck is going on. But you’re _disgusting_. I will spray you down with a garden hose.”

Stressed didn't begin to cover it. Jesse squinted at him. “No you won’t.”

The commander folded his arms. “I’ve done it before.”

Jesse couldn’t tell if he was joking. Reyes raised an eyebrow.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, good God. I’m not giving you a new uniform so you can fester and die in it.”

Jesse set the uniform down. “Then I won’t take the uniform.” He very much wanted to take the uniform.

“Jesus. Fucking Christ,” Reyes said slowly. “Listen, kid. This is for your health. You are covered in blood. There is greymatter on your face. I’m pretty sure that warehouse was infected with at least nine different diseases, and you crawled across the floor with open wounds. You. Need. To bathe.” 

Logically, Reyes was completely right. Jesse felt disgusting, both looked and smelled like a corpse, and did have a sneaking suspicion that some of the other gang members had contracted a form of the plague. However. He hated showers.

Strip naked of all weapons and potential protection from the elements, box himself into a walled-in cube with one way out, and then proceed to stop focusing on that one exit for any amount of time? Awful. In an unfamiliar place? Horrible. Not gonna happen.

Baths? Somehow even worse. Not only would he be in a cube, but he would be sitting in said cube, still defenseless and now without a proper line of sight. Also, swimming around in a pool of his own filth would be gross. He wouldn’t even get started on how much of a colossal waste of water either would be. Drinkable water, quite literally down the drain. Terrible.

“What about, like, some dirt, yanno? Like chickens do.”

“Like chickens.”

“Yeah.”

“To get clean,” the commander said, staring at him with wide, tired eyes. “You want to roll in the dirt.”

In retrospect, the chicken thing was a bad idea. “Yeah?”

Reyes took a very, very deep breath. “Okay, kid. Mccree. I’ll make you a deal. If you take a fucking shower, for the love of God, I will not throw you into a kiddie pool outside.”

Jesse momentarily considered this. He would be outside, which was an improvement, but he would also be sprayed with a hose, which was most definitely not. 

He shifted uncomfortably. “Are there at least...stalls? In the showers? Is...are the showers in a separate room?”

“Uh, yeah? What did you expect, we make our agents stand ass naked in the mess hall?”

Folks in Deadlock didn’t give a damn about modesty. People in the bunks slept nude, and kept their guns and knives under their pillows. It wasn’t odd to see people going about their lives never wearing a shirt, tits be damned. You wanted clean, you stood naked in the river like everyone else. Frankly, ‘ass naked in the mess hall’ wasn’t a stretch. 

“You hear some wild stories about Overwatch out there,” he said instead.

“Well, lucky for you, Blackwatch provides shower stalls.”

“Lucky for me.”

Reyes shook his head. “Fucking hell, kid. You sound more paranoid than I am.”

“Ain’t a bad thing to be cautious.”

He snorted at that. “Yeah, you’ll fit right in with Blackwatch. Come on.”

Reyes set Jesse on edge. He was nice, and he didn’t yell, or wave a gun around, or try to intimidate him. It wasn’t right. People weren’t just _nice_. Not in Deadlock, and certainly not in the government.   
Regardless, he followed the commander down to the showers. They were still in the basement, but seemed to be in a far more popular area, the dirt smell less prominent and the painted labels on the walls still intact. Jesse still hadn’t seen another agent. It made him uneasy. More uneasy. 

The showers were a separate room, albeit in loose terms; there wasn’t a door, but there were a pair of hallways to either side of the entrance, like the bathrooms in a grocery store. Thankfully, these were not printed with neat “men” and “women” signs on either side. He took the hallway to the left, only because Reyes stood on the right. It curved out, then in, opening up to the main room itself. Stone floors turned to tile on both the floors and walls, off-whites and blues that were cracked and sporting specks of mildew in the corners. The space was symmetrical, two doorways in leading to the same rectangular area, one on either side of the wall, with a shelf of cubbies nested against the tiles between them. The cubbies, like said tiles, were clearly old and more than a little worn, one with a wadded article of clothing--he thought it was a shirt--seemingly forgotten for God knows how long. Another, in upper left corner, was home to what he thought was an abandoned spider web, but closer inspection revealed a nondescript brown spider sitting on wispy threads, beside a taped-over note on the back panel that read “leave her alone she is nice” in scratchy black letters, accompanied by a yellow sticker of a smiley face. The spider scrabbled about when Jesse tapped lightly on the warped, wooden wall. He left her alone.

The first five showerheads on either side were out in the open, some dripping water in an unsteady rhythm. Four stalls, two to the left and right, were in the back, each with a blue curtain pulled open at the doorway. 

His spurs clicked and echoed as Jesse made his way across the dewy floors, and he fought the urge to flinch at the noise. Instead, he hugged the folded stack of clothes and towels he’s been given closer against his chest, taking some brief solace in the scent of cheap detergent-- the first he’d smelled it in years. The stall he in the back left corner had a flat, block light overhead, like every other shower in the room, though Jesse swore this one was, somehow, at least ten times brighter, like the lights on a stage. A glance into the stall next door, however, disproved his theory, as the light there was just as bright. The only stall without a light was the one across the room from him, in the opposite corner. For some reason, though, the flickering light fixture over the abandoned stall, which appeared to have been painted with the words “HAUNTED SHOWER :(“ made him uneasy. He stayed where he was.

Jesse pulled off his boots one at a time, tipping them upside down and producing a sizable pile of sand he promised himself to clean up later. He set them, now empty, along the wall, just far enough to keep them dry. He pulled his hat from his head and hung it over the boot on the right, and set the folded uniform beside it. Considered hanging the uniform up over the curtain rod, like he planned to do with the towel, but forced himself to decide against it. He’d brought them outside his stall instead of leaving them in a cubby, and that was good enough. His twisting insides seemed to disagree.

Finally, he turned and stepped into the stall, towel in hand. Took the blue curtain in his shaking fingers, and with a sharp tug, wrenched it closed. The clips holding it up shrieked over the metal bar as he did so, making him curl further into himself and the towel. He forced the towel from his shaky hands and tossed it, lengthwise, over the curtain rod, heartbeat thumping uncomfortably in his ears.

Wait. Listen.

He waited. He listened.

When no sounds came, he took the shredded denim of his jacket in his shaking, red-knuckled hands and flung it from his body with a force that was almost violent, hurling it over the curtain like a time bomb. The patched Deadlock name flickered across the back, and burned over the backs of his eyelids when he squeezed them shut. Jittery and on-edge, breath coming too fast and feeling too cold in his lungs. Step one.   
He fumbled for the hem of his shirt, noticing as he fisted in in his hands that one of his knuckles had opened up and begun bleeding. 

He waited. He listened again.

The shirt came off the same as the jacket, torn from his body fast enough to make the stitches under the armpits pop as he went. It was thrown away, same as the jacket, to land somewhere with a muted thump. He pried his arms away from where he’d wrapped them over one another and around his stomach, his fingernails leaving marks where he clung to his sides. Tried to stop shaking. Failed.   
He peeled away his jeans, next, fumbling with the ratty leather belt at his waist and flinging it away the same as his shirt. The plain, once silver buckle clattered against the tile floors and he flinched at the sound, hard. The shaking got worse. He almost fell over kicking away the jeans, feet snagging in the holes on the knees and dried blood gluing the denim to his skin, but he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. He was going to fucking do this. Step two.

He stripped away the last of his clothes--socks and underwear, and threw them both outside the stall, same as the rest, shaking hard enough to knock his elbows on the walls. He yanked the faucet sideways and was doused in cold water, already turning lukewarm as he stepped under the spray. He listened, harder still, to the point it made his head hurt. Carefully poked his head outside the curtain, too, just to make sure nothing had changed. His hat sat untouched on his dusty boots, his old clothes unmoved where they dotted the floors. Every stall was still open, every faucet still dripped. The light across the room still flickered. A part of him (most of him) wanted to go back and check on the spider, to see if she had moved. 

He convinced himself not to. Forced himself to take a few breaths, get his thoughts in order. Think positive. Warm water is nice, he tried. Holy fucking shit, you’re going to die if you don’t put your clothes back on, his brain replied. 

He shakily grabbed the bar of soap resting on the shelf beside him and started to scrub down his arms. It took a few tries to get any suds to show on his skin, and even longer for them to run white, rather than pink and brown. Flecks of grime and bone--someone else’s--fell to the floor as he went. Jesse forced back the rampant anxiety twisting his guts at the sight.

 _Reyes_ did that. He’d killed how many people back in the safehouse, and now he was just being nice out of the goodness of his own heart? Nice _didn’t happen_ to Jesse Mccree. There was no way a man like that, with so much blood on his hands-- literally and figuratively-- could just be nice. Jesse would know. Everything came with a price. He shuddered to think what Reyes’ might be. Pit fights? Organ trade? To make him into a killer of innocent people? Make him even worse than he already was? Maybe it was all just some sick joke. Maybe Reyes was going to walk in, laugh at him, and shoot him then and there. Mock him for feeling even the least bit safe. Jesse was in bad shape, before, when he’d first seen Reyes; up shit creek without a creek, but he’d had warning. And something to throw. Somewhere to hide. Now, he was defenseless, and trapped, and was almost definitely going to die. 

His arm was rubbed pink from where he’d dug into it with the soap bar. Jesse shook his head, frantically spraying the walls with drops of water.

 _No. No, No._ No. He was not going to die. He was going to shower, and he was going to put on his motherfucking pants, and _then_ he could die, probably. 

He left his arms alone, and started in on his legs. Was mildly soothed by the way his hair stuck up in cowlicks when he ran the soap over them. He found a cut on the back of his calf, mostly scabbed over, save for a few fresh cracks in it that had clotted shut with drops of blood. He wondered how long it had been there.

His front was a bloody mess. The little scrapes and lacerations from the glass where he’d crawled on his belly had since bled themselves closed, but passing the soap over them made them open up again, spilling little rivulets of red-pink water as it ran over his form. They were all superficial, though, fortunately enough, like the ones on his hands. A few would scar. Wasn’t like he was a blank canvas anyway, anymore. 

Doing his hair was, by far, the absolute worst. It required him to tilt his head back, pulling his eyes from where they were perpetually glued to the curtain, or even worse, to close them. Considered leaving his hair as it was, ran his fingers through it experimentally. His damp hands came away pink. A chunk of bone, or what he thought might have been bone, sat in the center of his palm, and he flapped his hand away in an effort to get if off. He really needed to wash his hair. He really, really, did not want to wash his hair. 

If someone came in when he wasn’t looking, for any reason, they could kill him before he had any time to defend himself. Everything he’d ever done, all the despicable deeds he’d committed just to stay alive, would be meaningless. But then, wasn’t everything already? Over the span of about the next 14 seconds, his brain forced itself through all five-- or however many-- remaining steps of grief, until the point at which he decided if he was going to die, he was going to die washing his damn hair, not lurking naked in wait to try to fight some hypothetical attacker. Theoretical attacker. One of the two. He distantly filed it away that in the case of a hypo-theoretical attacker, however, he could probably use his elbows as a knife. They were very sharp elbows. He tipped his head back into the spray.

Death! Dying! Fuck! Shit! Fuck! The die! You! His brain shrieked. 

It took four tries to get the soap to make suds at all. He kept trying, though, scrubbing at it over and over until the foam ran light and frothy, and his hair stopped feeling like straw. 

He turned the shower off, after that. The sudden silence left him, somehow, even more anxious than before. He waited. He listened. The showerheads still dripped unsteadily at the same points in the room. The electricity still hummed and sputtered somewhere across from him.

He pulled the towel, now just a little damp, from the curtain rod and wrapped it around himself like a blanket. The smell was comforting. Familiar. Detergent and fresh shower steam, like he was still living a normal life. Like he wasn’t a killer with blood on his hands and a bounty on his head. 

Drying off went fast, despite his own knocking into walls on unsteady, awkward legs, a different pallor entirely now that they weren’t covered in grime. He covered himself with the towel again and poked out his head from the curtain. Everything, still, was as he’d left it. A streak of wet blood and muck smeared across the floor leading to where his shirt had eventually landed. 

Quickly, fast enough to have been comical if he didn’t think his heart was about to explode, he darted out from behind the curtain and wadded the uniform in his hand, flinging himself back into the little cube just as hastily. One of his boots fell over as he went. His hat stayed on the other. 

He hastily unfolded the pants, startling as the motion sent a pair of thermal underwear flying directly into his face. Clean fucking underpants. He was blessed. They went on and with them, some small amount of his anxiety was soothed. 

He took the hem of the pants and pulled the waistband up to his belly button, awkwardly trying to smooth out the excess fabric that gathered around his knees and get it to fit comfortably between his legs. He failed. Like leggings, the fabric stretched where he didn’t want it to and bagged where he didn’t need it to, leaving him to hop around his tiny, slippery cubicle like some kind of injured waterfowl, knocking into walls and trying not to fall into the curtain and out of the stall like a dumbass. The padding over the thighs didn’t help. He was too small, still, too skinny for the medium but too long for the small, leaving the pads to wrap uncomfortably around his legs and the holster loops to sit too far back. A pair of socks were tucked between the sleeves of the shirt that fell out when he lifted it again, fit overlapping the leggings and coming to sit halfway up his shins. They reminded him of those weird, athletic toe-shoes, padded on the bottoms and braced around his ankles. He only fell once trying to get them on.

The shirt itself was a much easier endeavor. As expected, it bagged around his armpits and didn’t quite fit around his chest, not that he minded much. The padding, though, unlike the pants, lined up mostly where it should have and the turtleneck cut stopped the right distance up his neck.

It was pleasant. Made him almost feel… safe. Which, of course, was genuinely ridiculous, and a thought he allowed himself only for a moment before cautiously easing out from behind his curtain and pulling his boots on one after the other, dropping his hat on his head. He gathered up his old clothes where they sprawled across the floors and did his best to scuff the sand-blood-dirt mix into the drain where, with a lack of water to guide it, the sludge failed to spontaneously disappear. He checked, then double checked, then triple checked that he’d remembered to put on everything right-side in and frontwards, turned his shirt around, and wrapped his old clothes in the towel as he walked out of the showers. His hands still twitched without his telling them to. His heart still thundered uncomfortably under his ribs. None of it was new. The spider was still on her web where she’d been before. He waved.

Any brief semblance of calm Jesse managed to come up with immediately vanished as he walked out the doorway and realized Reyes, unlike Her, the spider, was not where he’d been before. Reyes, the Shotguns Guy, the guy who actually fought in the Omnic crisis and won, the super soldier, who could probably--definitely--break him in half was not where he was. Good thing or bad thing? Good thing: he could be gone, somewhere, meaning Jesse was not going to get broken in half, shot, stabbed, or otherwise killed instantly. Bad thing: he was actually just out of sight, meaning Jesse was very much about to be rendered inert via death. 

He pressed himself up against the outermost-inner wall and peered as far as he could up the hallway before him, which wasn’t all that much, considering the wide stairwell upwards only a few yards ahead. He stared hard at the corner of the stairs for any--any--semblance of movement, but found none. Scuttled back into the showers and went through the exit on the opposite side rather than dart across the gap to look out on the hallway to the right. His heart had, once again, begun jackhammering to the point of pain up against his ribs. The stale ham in his stomach twisted. Like the left side of the corridor, it was empty as far as he could see. No sign of Reyes. Jesse crept out from the doorframe, hand drumming along his hip where his pistol would have been. He listened. Faintly, to his right, someone breathed. 

“That was fast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO 
> 
> 100 kudos  
> more like  
> 100  
> hearts  
> for u  
> whom i lov


	6. 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Local Man Viciously Supported By Friends, Is So Tired
> 
> anyways im. APOLOGIES for that /very/ long gap between chapters  
> im still tryna get a wrangling on a sense of pacing and characterizations uh. pls bear with me?
> 
> also: misc blackwatch agents are gonna be pretty common? i hesitate to call em 'ocs' bc theyr really just there to be like. non essential npcs basically  
> like they show up sometimes n can be reoccurring if need be but mostly theyr just fillers and Magic Dialogue Sources so i can like. move the plot, since im a Lazy Fucker  
> so. theres those

**REYES** : He was actually crying ana. He was crying and i just left like a jackass and made everything worse  
**REYES** : I should have stayed right ? Maybe then we could finally fix something and stop fighting all the time  
**REYES** : Im such a dick arent i  
**AMARI** : gabi relax  
**AMARI** : ok so ignoring the fact ive seen jack cry like. once maybe  
**AMARI** : ever  
**AMARI** : like in my life  
**REYES** : Ana  
**AMARI** : u kinda had other stuff going on  
**AMARI** : like a teenager cowboy in interrogation  
**AMARI** : which i still do not 100% believe btw  
**AMARI** : but anyway  
**AMARI** : u couldnt rly be expected to drop all that to talk thru the whole thing right then and there  
**REYES** : But i still shouldnt have just left him there  
**AMARI** : stop tryin to get me to validate ur destructive thoughts  
**AMARI** : spoiler  
**AMARI** : i wont  
**REYES** : Ana its true though what i did wasnt okay  
**AMARI** : ok while ill concede that ya, talkin thru some of that might hav been good and that walkin may not hav been the BEST course of action  
**AMARI** : it also wasnt rly the time or place for that  
**AMARI** : and if somethin is important to u, like adopting a cowboy, then jack doesnt hav to take priority over that  
**AMARI** : ur not obligated to set aside the things that r important to u just bc hes upset  
**REYES** : He does the same for me though  
**AMARI** : gabe. the things that matter to jack r YOU and THE LAW but only sometimes i guess  
**AMARI** : im kinda iffy on his feelings abt the law i dont rly get what hes doin there tbh  
**AMARI** : but what im saying is. he can be kinda possessive. esp when it comes to u and attention  
**REYES** : I know that  
**REYES** : And ill tell him to step off if he needs to, and he will  
**REYES** : But he also just. Needs to not be alone sometimes. Like now  
**REYES** : And here i am.  
**AMARI** : omggg gabe u r KILLIN me. im DYING. u r DYING me, gab.  
**AMARI** : u want me to tell u that runnin straight to jack is the right thing?? im not gonna !! obv that isnt what you need rn, and honestly, ur health is more important  
**AMARI** : u gotta look out for urself too habibi  
**REYES** : I dont want to fight anymore  
**AMARI** : yea. i kno. take some time tho. when ur both a lil more levelheaded and also not interrogating a kid you can talk this all out and itl get better  
**REYES** : You think?  
**AMARI** : while i hav infinite faith in ur ability to shove ur foot in your mouth and also ass  
**REYES** : Thanks  
**AMARI** : i also hav faith in your ability to work things out  
**AMARI** : especially with jack  
**AMARI** : you two r a good team for a reason  
**REYES** : I dont know so much anymore  
**AMARI** : its thinking like that  
**AMARI** : that shoves ur foot  
**AMARI** : up ur own ass  
**REYES** : Ok fair

“Reyes”

Gabriel looked up. From down the hall, Torbjörn approached him, coffee held in each hand. Gabriel got up from where he leant against the showers’ outer wall to face him. “Hey, Torb.”

He passed Gabriel one of the coffees and cleared his throat, gaze flicking over his face with mild concern. Which was fair, considering he looked like shit, and, like most people with eyes, he knew it. “You...you alright?”

Gabriel snorted. “Whatever.”

Torbjörn took a long, slow sip of his coffee. “You...wanna talk about it?”

Yes. Should he, however? No. “You don’t have to get emotional with me about this, Lindholm.”

“Oh thank shit,” he guffawed, and Gabriel chuckled along with him. This coffee was less shitty than the previous, but not by much. Unlike Gabriel, Torbjörn seemed to have had the foresight to actually stir a reasonably measured amount of grounds in it, rather than just dropping one of the solid clumps into the bottom.

He leaned up against the wall beside him, quietly sipping from his mug. A relatively comfortable silence fell in between. Gabriel figured Torbjörn was supporting him, in his own, quiet way. When they’d first met, Gabriel had thought him to be a self-centered, uncaring jackass-- only in it all for the glory, or the opportunity, or something. He’d thought the same of Jack. Torbjörn tipped his opinions upside-down, though, when the five of them had once stumbled upon a little boy in King’s Row. It wasn’t that he didn’t give a shit-- the opposite, in fact --Torbjörn was just...quiet in the way he cared. He was never particularly fantastic in being emotionally supportive outside his wife and children, but he did his best. Speaking of, actually.

“How’s Astrid, anyway?”

At the mention of his wife, Torbjörn looked up. “Astrid? She’s good, light of my life.” Gabriel rolled his eyes, and Torbjörn stepped on his foot before continuing. “See her and the kids every few nights on video chat.”

“Good to hear. You’ve got what, eight of ‘em now?” He had eleven.

“ _Eleven_ ,” Torbjörn corrected, snappishly. Gabriel held up his hands in a placating gesture, careful not to spill his mug, and Torbjörn seemed to accept the apology. “You want to see pictures?”

“Like I’d say no, you asshole.” Torbjörn grinned at him, passing his coffee to his left hand to reach into his pocket. Gabriel was only mildly concerned the cup would slip from his grip or be shattered as he did so. Torbjörn complained about the sensitivity so often it was hard not to. And yet, he supposedly never made the adjustments to fix it, despite being his own mechanic. Gabriel was fairly certain he just liked to complain. One of the many reasons they got along.

Torbjörn eventually wrestled out a battered leather wallet, flipping it open and unfolding a roll of photos, Jacob’s-ladder style. He handed one end to Gabriel and stretched them out, then proceeding to name each child as he pointed --or gestured, rather-- to them with his mug. About half looked like their parents, armed swaths of thick blonde hair and gold-brown eyes. The others were a menagerie of children that had been swept into the Lindholm’s welcoming arms over the years, including the boy from London, who now owned a small restaurant in the same city that Gabriel and the other four SEP Overwatch members made a point of visiting whenever they were nearby. The photos were arranged by age, with the youngest all crammed into a single photo at the end, a pair of flaxen twins beside a young girl with brown skin, just light enough to leave freckles visible sprawling over her nose, all hardly more than toddlers. Gabriel chuckled.

“You’re one hell of a bleeding heart, Torb, I gotta say.” He passed the roll back, folding up the pictures carefully as he did so.

Torbjörn made a show of elbowing Gabriel in the side as he stuffed the wallet back into his pocket. “You’ve damn near adopted every Blackwatch agent you’ve got, and I’m the soft one here?”

He snorted. “I haven’t _adopted_ anyone.”

Torbjörn rolled his eyes, swapping his drink back over to his right. “Not officially, but most of ‘em would rather have you than their folks.”

“That’s because most of their parents were assholes.”

“Right, and the fact they all think you hung the moon ‘s just a coincidence.”

“Not my fault they’ve all got low standards.”

Torbjörn punched him in the gut, only halfway-playfully. Gabriel doubled over slightly, sloshing a bit of the coffee from his mug. “Guh.”

“Ah, hush, y’big baby.”

“Your arm’s made of metal.”

Torbjörn waved him off. “On that note, though, tell me more about the new kid you dragged in.”

Gabriel stopped rubbing his stomach and furrowed his brow. “You were there for his interrogation.”

Torbjörn shrugged. “Sure. Wanna know what you’re thinking, though.”

Ugh. “I don’t know. He’s got potential for field work, I think.”

“You just wanted him for Blackwatch, then?”

“Saw his file, didn’t you?” He took a sip from his mug, now cool enough to drink without wincing. Torbjörn had been drinking from his since they’d started talking, but if drinking molten coffee bothered him at all, he didn’t seem to show it. “He’s got a record longer than some of my senior agents, and a bounty to match. Talked up by the state, talked up by Deadlock--by their victims, too. Said he’s a force to be reckoned with.”

Torbjörn frowned. “Didn’t seem like much to me.”

“He tried to kill me with a cell phone, actually. The only one of the whole lot in the nest who didn’t get killed or subdued by force. Hell of a lot more competent than he looks.” He slouched his shoulder against the wall and sighed. “Honestly, though, I wanted him to go to Jack. But that plan obviously fell through.”

Torbjörn winced at the bitterness in his tone. “Oh.” A few seconds of silence hung dead between them, more uncomfortable now, before Torbjörn spoke again. “Think it’s good he didn’t, you ask me.”

Gabriel looked up.

“Overwatch ain’t a place for kids.”

“Shit, Torb, you think I don’t know that?” he snapped. “Safer than Blackwatch, though, and it’s not like he’s got many other options at this point.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Torbjörn growled back, just as vicious. Another reason Gabriel liked him. “Least Blackwatch has something close. Agents talk to each other--talk to you--so he’s got some semblance of a support system. Gods know Jack’s shit with anyone under sixty.”

Jack wasn’t _shit_. He was just...distant, sometimes. Hard to understand. Like Torbjörn, emotions just weren’t his forte, albeit to a different extent. He wasn’t _shit_ , though. He was alright with Mercy and Fareeha. Usually.

“Come on, Reyes.”

“...Other than Jack, Reinhardt’s there, too. You’re there, and you’re a whole lot better with kids than I am. Ana’s…” He briefly thought about Fareeha. Her last birthday, she’d asked to spar with Jack as a gift and nearly broken his arm, proclaiming it was the best birthday she’d ever had, and that next time she’d get him to tap out first, then proceeding to eat three pieces of cake on her own. Ana cried. After she finished recording, that is.

“Ana’s a goddamn terror, and her kid’s either gonna save the world, or end it.”

“Like Blackwatch has anyone better.” He choked down another mouthful of coffee. “Besides, the kid--Mccree-- he’s hardly even a kid at all. He’s seventeen. How old Jack was when he hit basic, and he did just fine.” Torbjörn looked up from the rim of his cup, one eyebrow raised.”And he’s smarter than he looks. He’d be alright.”

“Then why’d you take him?”

“Aside from the fact that it was the only fucking option?”

“Not the only one,” Torbjörn pointed out. “He could’ve gone to prison.”

“Like I’d send him to prison.”

“Why not?”

Gabriel threw his hands in the air, feeling a wave of coffee spill over his clenched fist on the mug’s handle. “Because-- shit, I don’t know!” It was bullshit, of course; he knew exactly why he’d taken the kid. He was seventeen. He’d killed people and broken laws and, were he a grown man, Gabriel would have condemned him to die in a cell. But he wasn’t. He was _seventeen_. He fucked up. Gabriel didn’t send him to prison because in him, he saw Blackwatch. He saw Martinez, who excelled in physical interrogation, and who’d cried when she had the flu and Gabriel held her hand. Saw Bramson, who never took off his shoes off his feet or his eyes off the door, but who sang for the agents stuck in the medbay whenever he could. Saw Stanton, whose trigger finger never hesitated but whose garden, meticulously-kept, gained a new flower for every life they took. And he saw one Jesse Mccree, who looked down the barrel of a shotgun with a smile on his face and tried to eat his uniform when he thought Gabriel wasn’t looking. He took Mccree because no one else would.

“Blackwatch needs the fresh blood,” he lied. “And he’s the right material for it. Good kid, somewhere. Someone just has to give him a chance.”

Torbjörn squinted at him. “Didn’t he try to shoot you?”

“Half of my agents have tried to shoot me.” They were good kids, too.

Torbjörn shook his head. “And you call me the softie. Your heart’s too big for your own good, Reyes.” He sighed. “Only hope it doesn’t get you into trouble someday.”

“Could say the same to you, Torb.”

He chuckled, a little sadly. “Yeah.”

Before Gabriel had a chance to respond, he was interrupted by Mccree’s appearing in the doorway to his left, startling a little despite Gabriel having been standing in plain sight. It took him a moment to realize it was Torbjörn that had caught him off guard. Which made sense, really, considering he’d never actually met him before.

“Oh, hey kid.”

“Er,” Mccree squawked. “Hi. I’m, uh… my clothes’re clean now. I mean, the clothes I’m wearing.” He awkwardly hefted the shredded remnants of what was once an outfit in his arms. “These aren’t. I, uh...mmhm.” He trailed off, having since curled in on himself a bit, frantically glancing between Torbjörn and Gabriel, eyes wide.

“Okay?” Gabriel asked, trying to be calming, but seemingly having the opposite effect as Mccree tucked further into his shoulders, desperately trying to be as small as possible while he spoke.

“What...should I do with these..?” he squeaked.

Thankfully, Torbjörn beat him to the punch before Gabriel could make matters worse. “Those? Find a garbage empty enough to fit ‘em. Better yet, find some place to burn ‘em where the fumes won’t kill somebody. Do us all a favor and get rid of them, somehow. I don’t care.”

Mccree glanced back to Gabriel, who shrugged. “No, he’s got a point. Really, just throw those away. Not like there’s much to waste.”

Mccree stared at him, again, eyes flicking back and forth as if he were searching for some meaning he’d missed, or misunderstood. “...Right.” No one moved.

Torbjörn shifted a little uncomfortably. “Well. I’m off to go… give Jack a report, or... something. Good talking to ya, Gabriel.” He started to shuffle away, but Gabriel stopped him with a flap of his hand.

“Wait, one second.” He knocked back the rest of his awful coffee, just barely refraining from choking, and pushed the mug into Torbjörn’s hand. His voice came out a little gravellier than expected, throat nearly glued shut with since-settled instant sludge. “Can you take this with you? Thanks.” Torbjörn glared at him and spat something vulgar in Swedish, but turned and walked back the way he came nevertheless. Mccree watched owlishly from behind his shoulder, feigning nonchalance as Gabriel turned back around to face him. They stood there in silence for a few moments before Mccree spoke.

“So, uh. What now?”

Gabriel tried to cough up some of the coffee grounds, to no avail. “Your clothes fit?” he wheezed.

Mccree glanced down at himself, looking a little surprised he’d asked at all.“Oh, uh, yeah.” He stuck out a leg experimentally. “These’re real nice.”

“Good to hear. How your hands doing?”

He glanced down at them, then, hugging the wad of filthy clothes to his chest so as not to drop them as he turned up his palms. Bleeding a little, in some places, Gabriel noted unhappily. If the small cuts were still open, the larger lacerations must be moreso. “They’re good,” Mccree chirped. Gabriel wrinkled his nose.

“Next stop is the med bay,” he grunted, and Mccree opened his mouth to protest. Gabriel didn’t give him the chance. “No ifs, ands, or buts about it, kid. You won’t let someone else do it, that’s fine--” It wasn’t, really. He’d far rather he got actual medical attention, but his injuries were mild enough Gabriel didn’t see the need to start off on an ugly note in trying to force him. “--but you’re getting some basic first aid on those before you die of an infection, first thing.”

The med bay, unlike everything else so far in Grand Mesa, was upstairs, closer to the agents’ sleeping quarters and vehicle bay. Like the trip down to the showers, Mccree followed a few paces back, gaping at anything (or nothing) they passed, spurs clicking away on the stone floors and up the stairs. He’d have to have a talk about those, if Mccree chose field work. Gabriel turned down another maze-like corridor at the top of the stairs, relying on what he hoped he remembered of the watchpoint rather than checking his holopad for the map. They soon began passing closed wooden doors, each outfitted with a small, hanging chalkboard on which a name was written. A number of them had a shoddy recreation of the Blackwatch logo in the corner, smudged over and in one case, defaced with drawings of dicks over the entirety. Mccree snorted. The further down the corridor he walked, the more clearly Gabriel could hear voices far in front of them, too far still for Mccree to have been able to pick up. He considered mentioning it then, but figured having your boss point out the fact that he was way more attuned to his surroundings than you, and also had superhuman senses would be a little. Disconcerting, to say the least. He knew for a fact, actually-- his CO did the same thing to all the recruits back in the SEP, and it creeped the shit out of him, if he was being honest. Decidedly a bad idea. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mccree tilt his head toward the hallway’s end, brow furrowed. Figured it out on his own. He tensed up again, as if he weren’t tense before, but didn’t say anything otherwise.

The hallway turned right at the end, continuing on in one direction and opening up into a small living room tucked into the wall of the corner. In it were a number of agents, two of which arguing about something unintelligible, another sprawled seemingly oblivious on the sofa, and one sitting on the counter of the little kitchenette within, interested only in the glow of the microwave. As they passed by, Mccree quietly slid to Gabriel’s opposite side, nearly pressing himself into the wall with his head down, but eyes locked on the arguing duo. One of which, he realized was Kvonch, spitting a number of profanities, thick black hair bouncing as she flapped her hands about irritably. The agent she was arguing with, like the one on the couch, was dressed in blue rather than black, attempting to flag down his fellow agent to no avail. He groaned. He really, really did not want to deal with some petty Overwatch/Blackwatch drama. Bad move, he realized, as the Overwatch agent glanced his way. Upon catching sight of him, the agent in blue paled almost comically, mouth snapping shut and jerking upright. The couch-goer followed his gaze and followed suit, scrabbling up and sending the remote launching from where it lay on their stomach. Kvonch took a moment longer to look over, shoving the cloud of hair out of her face with a glare fixed on her lips. The moment she identified Gabriel, though, her face twisted up into a crooked smile.

“Boss!” she cried. The Blackwatch agent at the microwave looked up long enough to give him a lazy, two-fingered wave before slouching back down to hawk at whatever was heating up inside.  
“Commander Reyes,” the pale Overwatch agent nearly shouted, throwing up a hand hard enough that Gabriel was briefly worried he’d be concussed. The couch-agent tossed a salute up much the same. Kvonch did not salute at all, first hopping over the couch and bounding over to him before assuming a rigid ready stance and executing a sharp salute, mimicking the pale agent almost exactly. She dropped out of it just as fluidly, snickering.

He wasn’t really in the mood at the moment. “Agent,” he growled. Kvonch’s face lit up. Then again, who was he kidding.

“Shit, patron,” she gasped. “How’d the interrogations go? I got benched for ‘em, stuck up here the whole time, I haven’t heard _anything_.” Mccree twitched at his side, imperceptible had Gabriel not specifically been paying attention.

“Got a new agent out of it,” he told her, jerking a shoulder back at Mccree, who, upon being noticed, straightened upright with an easy grin plastered to his face like it had been there the whole time. Kvonch clutched at his shoulder and leaned over him on her toes, gaping at Mccree with a toothy smile wide on her face.

“We got guppies?” she gasped, delightedly. Gabriel swatted her off, forcing her back a few steps, at least.

“Just this one.”

Mccree stepped forward, tipping his hat and grinning. Gabriel was… surprised, to say the least. Everything he knew of the boy thusfar was contradictory-- the easy, fearless snark with which he’d faced Jack opposite the skittish panic he fell into around Gabriel, broken by spells of quippy calmness only seeming to emerge when he was distracted. It was the same now, him flipping from hesitant and wary to personable and confident in the span of a second, with not a tic or tell to indicate he felt otherwise.

“Jesse Mccree,” he drawled, flashing Kvonch an exaggerated wink. “Pleasure to meet ya.”

She squealed in delight, bouncing up and down on her toes and sending her hair exploding in a halo around her head. “What the _fuck_?” she shrieked excitedly. “Please, please, _please_ , patron, can we keep him?”

Before he could respond, the pale agent shouted out to him, still standing rigid behind the sofa, “Excuse me, Commander,” loud enough that all of them jumped, the pale agent included. He snapped his hand down from its salute--had he been like that the whole time?--and took a few shaky steps forward. Gabriel groaned, quietly. He very much did not want to deal with this guy. But alas, fucking duty calls. He turned toward the agent.

“Don’t scare him too bad, Kvonch. I’ll kill you,” he warned, meandering over to the pale agent. The threat was empty, of course, and she knew it. Mccree flinched, though, and Gabriel cringed inwardly. Way to go, jackass. He’d try to patch that one up later.

He took another few steps forward until he stood beside the couch, and leaned against it, half-sitting on the arm. The pale, shaky agent saluted him again. “I-I’m agent Christopher Martin.” Shouted at him, like Gabriel was a drill sergeant. Gross.

“Okay,” he deadpanned. The agent--Martin--faltered. “Put your arm down, kid. I’m not gonna make you run laps, or anything.” He paused. “Actually, I will, if you don’t stop yelling.”

“Understood, sir,” he shouted. Gabriel glared at him. “Understood, I mean. Sir. Sorry, sir.” At least he was quiet, this time. The sofa-agent shifted stiffly where they still stood. Gabriel flapped a hand at them until they relaxed, and eventually sat back down.

“Yeah, yeah. What do you want?”

Martin swallowed, hard, wide eyes glancing everywhere but Gabriel’s own for a few seconds before he finally settled, mouth setting in a stony line as he spoke. “I, uh. I had, er, _have_ some concerns, and. Questions. About the way Blackwatch is currently functioning.” Not this. He glanced over Gabriel’s shoulder, back at Kvonch, he assumed, face sour. “I believe, respectfully, sir, that some of your agents are...unfit for this line of work.” God help him. “If I could provide some suggestions to help your organization run more smoothly, I think my ideas could facilitate a _significant_ improvement in performance.” Gabriel inhaled through his nose, very slowly. The microwave beeped, and the Blackwatch agent waiting for her food threw him an apologetic look as she slipped away. Traitor. “Now, Overwatch is more populated, and runs more effectively because of that, which brings me to my first suggestion: allowing partial command of Blackwatch to Overwatch.” 

He fucking hated Grand Mesa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my pacing and writing inconsistencies appear from the shadows and haunt me, killing me instantly


	7. 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI THIS IS,. SHORT. SORRY  
> im workin on the new one already tho i just thought it might need split into two parts ?? my pacings still kinda inconsistent n so r my characterizations m bad but thanks 4 hangin in there so far
> 
> ALSO this is the last we see of kvonch i think !!!  
> n dont worry gabe clears up the whole 'threatening 2 kill u in a bro way' mess in the next one

“Don’t scare him too bad, Kvonch. I’ll kill you.”

Jesse’s world, which had only just begun trying to recover on its freshly-thrown axis, stopped spinning entirely. Distantly, he was aware of Kvonch laughing, swatting away at Reyes as he left them behind to talk to the blue-suited agent still shouting from the sitting room.

This was it. The other shoe had dropped. The slap in the face he’d been expecting the whole time now swung into his peripheries, and all he could do was brace for the impact. Reyes wasn’t just nice. He wasn’t any different from any of the superiors Jesse’d had before. He threatened violence and fear to get what he wanted and to push people around, just like all the rest. “I’ll kill you,” Montego had said, before she shot a man in the head and ordered someone else to clean it up. “I’ll kill you,” Stone had warned Montego, after he broke her arm and took three of her fingers. 

“I’ll kill you,” Reyes had said to Kvonch, and Jesse prepared himself for the worst. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. The most he could do was stand completely still and wait for Kvonch’s chest to erupt out in red, or wish, for her sake, that she would just _shut up_ before it did, before it was _her_ fingers that were broken, and _her_ lip that was split, and _her_ arm that was branded and inked with the words “Deadlock Rebels.”  
She didn’t, though. She kept laughing, and kept chattering on about the agent in blue and how often he complained about the way Blackwatch was run, despite never having run anything more than the cash register at a coffee shop in college. As her face opened up into wide smiles and colorful means of complaining, Jesse started to notice things; the little details he’d missed until this point, more swept away by Kvonch’s gleeful fearlessness as she broke the bubble of space around her superior and survived. 

The tiny scars that dotted her face and her hands, making white-pink swells out of her knuckles that could have only been born from fighting and hitting. The little, healed-over ruts on her face were the same-- a swooping arc below her eye where the skin had split over bone, a little rivulet over her upper lip where it, like Jesse’s, had been hit hard enough to tear open, a crookedness to her nose that had escaped his notice before, but now stood out to him like a screaming, red flag. 

Rather than panic, though, he just felt… disappointed, maybe. He was scared, sure, but it was more of a resigned kind, cold and quiet in the pit of his stomach that made him just want to find a quiet place to curl up on the ground and close his eyes in the dark, just to be a little less tired. 

The worst part was, he was starting to like Reyes. Starting to like the idea of Blackwatch. He let childish hopes and dreams and optimism get to him, and now he was going to pay for it. Somehow, someday.  
Oddly enough, though, what came next wasn’t the inevitable spread of blood over the cement floors as Kvonch’s chest bloomed out into an ugly, wet rose, like he wholly expected, but instead just her waving a hand in front of his face and blowing a raspberry at him.

“Huh?” He couldn’t see. The world was still a nauseating smear of colors and noise, darkened around the edges like a tunnel.  
“I said hello, guppy. Worried I broke you already!” she stopped for a moment to giggle. “If I’m all it takes, you’ll have a hell of a time in the big tank!” She exploded into laughter, again, clapping her hands together with a near-deafening noise. Jesse flinched, but only distantly. He was still so _numb_. 

“Sure I’ll manage,” he grinned at her, not reaching his eyes, the movement feeling stiff like he’d just come from the dentist. He hurt, a little dully, just below his breastbone. Why did he expect anything different? What made him so stupidly expect that his life could be okay, or that somebody, _anybody_ , would care about what happened to Jesse Mccree again after everything he’d done?

“‘Sides, I don’t think you’re givin’ yourself enough credit.” He willed the world back into focus as he tried, valiantly, to fall into the loose smile and easy confidence that kept him alive.

Kvonch giggled again and laid a hand over her chest, the other over her forehead as she pretended to swoon. “Flatterer,” she crooned. Her eyes glanced over him as she straightened, very quietly calculating in a way that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He likely wouldn’t have noticed were his insides not melting from the anxious fit his gut was in. “Everyone back home is gonna love you.” Her voice was a little softer, this time. 

“Back home?” he ventured.

She lit up again, flinging her arms out wide and beaming. “Oh, gup, you have no idea. Gibraltar-- it’s another watchpoint, and its massive. Makes good old Granny Mess look like a steaming pile of shit. It’s where most everyone is, if they’re not permanently stationed somewhere else, or,” she made a face. “Drawn for a temp term at one of the little squats, like this one.”  
Kvonch folded her arms and sighed, wistfully. “Trust me, you’re gonna love it out there.”

Jesse did a brief double take. “Wait, what?”

She shrugged. “Reyes didn’t tell you, yet? All new recruits, field or not, go to Gibraltar first. Blackwatch HQ. The big, wormy apple.”

Going to Gibraltar? Where the hell even was Gibraltar? He’d barely even been out of the southern US. Kvonch continued, waving her hand idly through the air as she spoke.

“That’s where you get trained, where they give you your first few assignments, if you decide on field work.” Her voice turned bitter. “Where they set up the big missions, too. All the fun ones come out of Gibraltar. Everything here is super boring.”

Jesse rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. He’d definitely have to ask about Gibraltar later. First, though, he had to do something stupid.

“Sound like you ain’t a fan of being out here.”

Kvonch snorted. “Course I’m not, it’s boring as shit out here.” She tilted her head to the side, bouncing a shoulder noncommittally. “But, it’s what the boss ordered, so here I am.” Her eyes fell onto Jesse’s now, calculating. Her posture stayed loose. Jesse very subtly rolled onto the balls of his feet. “That’s how it works. We don’t complain, y’know? Cause we love Reyes.” She said it nonchalantly, boring into him. Her chest didn’t falter in rhythm, her brow remained dry, her face, her fingers, her eyelids didn’t twitch. Honest, or very convincingly trying to look it.

“Everyone does. He’s a big old softie, under everything else.” Her face split into a grin, but a genuine one, lips pulling back to reveal shiny white enamel. “Blackwatch sticks together, yeah?”

Jesse swallowed. 

Kvonch’s eyes darted sideways to where Reyes stood, facing away. She glanced back to Jesse, reaching a hand behind her back. Jesse took half a step backwards. 

“It’s about trust, guppy. Trusting your fellow agents. Trusting your commander.” Very slowly, Kvonch pulled her hand back into view, fingers wrapped around the hilt of a very, very sharp looking survival knife. Jesse took another step away. If he could get enough distance between them, he might have a chance, at least. To his surprise, though, Kvonch slid her fingers to the bottom of the hilt, thumb and pointer loosely pinching the sides so it tipped over, blade pointed down. She extended it to Jesse, hefting it and inclining her head after he failed to take it. 

Oh, this was stupid. This was so fucking stupid. He reached out hesitantly, gingerly taking the knife from below her hand. Before he had a chance to draw away, she caught his fist in her free hand, lightly covering his knuckles with her palm. Oh, fuck. So stupid. He didn’t move, didn’t even dare breathing. Kvonch smiled mischievously, and winked. 

“Blackwatch’s gotta look out for our own. Reyes looks out for us and we--” she squeezed his hand around the knife, almost enough to hurt, but not quite. “--do the same. Guppy or not.”  
Her hands fell away, and Jesse jerked back as soon as he had the chance. His heart thundered in his eardrums as he shifted the knife in his hand into a proper swinging stance, just in case. To hell if it provoked her. 

Kvonch beamed at him, bouncing up and down and clapping her hands. “Welcome to the family!” she squealed. _What the fuck is going on what the fuck is going on what the fuck is goi-_ “You’re not really supposed to have that, though.” 

She twisted around, rolling up the back of her uniform’s shirt, pointing at a little pocket sewn into the pants that lay underneath where a knife could rest comfortably. “I’d keep it quiet, for a while. Don’t let any of the Overwatch operatives see you with it, yet. They’ll tattle on you, no questions asked.” When Jesse still didn’t respond, she continued, softer. “Relax, gup. You’ll be alright. Reyes isn’t so bad, and you’ll get used to all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.” 

She clapped her hand over her mouth, abruptly enough that Jesse launched himself about a foot backwards. “Oh, shit!” she shrieked. “ Cloak-and-dagger? get it?” She pointed at the knife. “Fuck, that’s good.”  
Jesse stared at her, gaping, still on the tips of his toes. Tension in his calves wound tight enough to snap, grip white-knuckled on the knife still in his hand. Kvonch pointed at it again.  
“No, seriously. You should put that away.”

Trust your fellow agents, she’d said. Trust the woman who’d just given him a weapon for seemingly no reason other than she’d wanted to. It wasn’t a piece of trash, either, like she’d given him something she would have thrown away otherwise. The leather grip was still smooth and shiny in his hand, just worn in enough to fit comfortably in his palm. The blade was sharp and silvery, still relatively unscratched and entirely unchipped or notched by years of use. It was perfectly usable. In the prime of its condition, even. And Kvonch had just… given it to him. Just because she wanted to. 

It stumped him. She didn’t have to be nice to him; to smile, to laugh, to try and comfort him in her own way, to give him a knife. The same way Reyes didn’t have to feed him, or give him a uniform, or take him to a doctor, like he said he was going to. But they _did_. And that was the part he still didn’t get. There was no reason for it. 

He awkwardly fumbled at the back of his uniform, shoving the knife into the pocket at the small of his back, pulling the shirt back down overtop and smoothing it out as Kvonch watched him with wide-eyed amusement. 

“...Thanks?” he tried. It seemed to be the right thing to say, as Kvonch’s smile bloomed back over her face and she tipped forward, laughing. 

“Sure thing, gup.” Flashed him an apologetic smile. “Sorry if I spooked you, there.”

“Naw,” Jesse lied. It was terrifying, actually, but she didn’t seem to have meant it, not really. “Think ‘scared shitless’ is just my regular.” 

Kvonch laughed again and clapped a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but not as hard as he would have before. She leaned in a little closer, still smiling, and squeezed his shoulder. Her hand was warm.  
“You’re gonna be just fine.” She winked at him again, reached up and flicked the brim of his hat. 

“Stop bullying the new kid,” Reyes barked, still leaned up against the couch and speaking to the agent in blue. Kvonch stuck her tongue out at him. He turned back to the agent and, after a moment, wandered back to where she and Jesse were standing. 

“So,” she said, grinning, bouncing on her toes. “Fuck that guy?”

Reyes pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. “Fuck that guy.” Kvonch burst into laughter, pitching forwards with one arm around her waist, the other steadying on Reyes’ shoulder. He pitched his voice up in what Jesse assumed to be a mockery of the agent’s voice and continued. “Oh, I know how to run Blackwatch! I’m a private who’s been stationed at Grand Mesa for eight months! Ugh.” He dragged his hands down his face. “Uuuuugh.”

“Now you see what I live with, patron? And you still won’t let me come home! Who’s the real bully, here?”

“Still you, probably. You’re always doing something to someone. Do not,” he snapped, as Kvonch wiggled her eyebrows. Jesse snorted.

Reyes glanced back over at him as Kvonch doubled over again, wheezing with laughter, and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t encourage her.” 

She weakly slapped Reyes’ chest, still heaving for breath between giggles.

He pulled at one of her curls. “Insubordination.” Shoved her, lightly. “Get off me. You like this kid so much, let me get him to the medbay.” Kvonch straightened and wiped at her eyes. 

“You’re pretty far from the medbay.”

Reyes pushed her off. “Shut up, Kvonch,” he said, without venom. 

She looked at Jesse again, eyes wide. “Wait, you’re fucked up? Gonna have any good scars?” Before he could answer, she pulled down the neck of her uniform to expose the skin of her collarbone, broken only by a single mole and a fat, pink rope of scar tissue that snaked dangerously close to the side of her throat. “Beat _this_.”

Reyes saved him. “Nope,” he said, snatching her hand away and yanking the fabric back into place as she whined at him. “Fucking. Why are you like this?” She wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out, weakly blowing another raspberry through her grin.

“But really, though, if you wanted to get to the med bay you should have turned right at the stairs.” She jabbed a thumb behind her. “If you take the next turn in the hallway you’ll get there eventually.”

“Thanks, Kvonch,” Reyes said. He waved a hand at Jesse and started his way down the hall.

“Love you too!” she cried after him, flashing Jesse a brilliant smile as he scrabbled to catch up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as per usual if anyones got suggestions r critiques i welcom them WHOLEHEARTEDLY  
> this is my first time actually WRITING anything so. its a lil bit of a mess me bad


	8. 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI HERES ANOTHER SHORT BABY CHAPTER BC IM VERY BAD AT A SCHEDULE OTHERWISE  
> JESSE HAS VERY POOR SELF ESTEEM BUT I SWEAR HE GETS BETTER, FT. REALLY CLICHE CHAPTER ENDS
> 
> NO SECOND DRAFTS OR BETA READERS WE WE DIE LI8KE MENN

He followed Reyes in relative silence, for a while. The walls here were a cobbled-together blend of wood and stone, doorframes and corners scratched and worn down from years of use. It made the sound of his spurs echo oddly, bouncing from wood to stone to wood again. 

Reyes glanced over at him.

“Kvonch didn’t bother you, did she? If she did, you can say something.” He picked at the back of the beanie on his head.

Jesse frowned. Kvonch had scared him, sure, but… she didn’t really mean to. And she’d given him a weapon, for which he was infinitely grateful. She got a lot closer than he’d generally prefer, though. If it were anyone from Deadlock, he’d have responded with a resounding ‘yes’. ‘Yes, holy fucking shit.’ He’d have said how they stunk like gunpowder and blood and filth, and how their breath reeked so bad he could taste it when they spoke, curdling on his tongue like rotting garbage.

But she wasn’t. She didn’t carry the overwhelming stench of death on her skin. She didn’t make him feel like he walked a thread between everything being fine and his being doomed. Her hands were warm.

“I’d never hurt her, you know. I shouldn’t have said otherwise. Bad joke.”

She wasn’t scared of Reyes, not at all. She’d warned him about getting caught by Overwatch agents, but she hadn’t said anything about Reyes finding out about the knife. If anything, she’d assured him that he’d be safe with Blackwatch and its commander. She leaned on Reyes’ shoulder and grabbed onto his arm and swatted at his chest like it was second nature, like the idea of being hurt in retaliation didn’t even occur to her at all. 

Reyes didn’t seem upset, either. Nothing about the way he stood or spoke said that he intended to harm anyone. And Jesse knew what the opposite looked like, having seen it reduce close to 30 people to waste. He didn’t hurt Kvonch when he pushed her away or tugged at her hair. Seemed like he was actually making an effort not to. 

And now he was making an effort to make Jesse feel like he was not about to die. He still couldn’t quite figure out why. He was almost definitely going to die here, in Blackwatch, whatever it was. He had no illusions about the fact. So being nice didn’t have any purpose. He wasn’t an investment. 

Which meant, against every conceivable truth in the universe, that Reyes and Kvonch were just nice.

“Naw,” he murmured, tentatively. Reyes looked over at him. “She was… real nice, actually.” 

“You don’t just have to say that.”

“‘M not.”

They fell back into an awkward silence, after that, until Jesse remembered what he’d meant to ask about, before. 

“Uh. Where’s Gibraltar?” he mumble-blurted, and immediately regretted it. That sounded so dumb. Reyes probably thought he was beyond stupid, now. ‘ _Oh fantastic, not only is this pity case seventeen and paranoid, he’s also an idiot! Surprise!_ ’ 

Reyes did a double-take, dropping his thumb from where he pressed it to his cheek. Looked like he chewed on the inside of his mouth, then, as a habit. Jesse quietly filed it away and resolved to find out what exactly the tell told, but later.

“Huh? Oh, Gibraltar. It’s uh,” he waved a hand. “In the far south of Spain. You… know where Spain is?” 

He didn’t sound particularly judgemental, but Jesse snapped back anyway. “Course I do.”

“Right.” Reyes nodded a little jerkily, reaching back to fidget with his hat again. “Wait, why’d … did Kvonch tell you, then?” He threw out a hand in what might have been a placating gesture. “Not that I’m mad. I’m not mad. At her. Or anyone. It’s not bad that she told you, if she did.”

Jesse shrugged, stiffly, any fire left in him already gone. “Yeah? She uh. She said that’s where new recruits go. Is that… where I’m goin’?” 

“Yeah, that’s where we’re going, after I wrap up here. Should be a day, two at the most.” He gnawed on the inside of his face again. Jesse swore his teeth looked red-pink, for a moment. “The next group of recruits won’t be coming in until about two weeks after that, so you’d get a chance to catch up, training-wise.” Reyes mumbled the last part more to himself than Jesse, staring ahead at nothing in particular.

“I don’t need to be trained,” Jesse assured him. Don’t owe any favors, not to anyone. Not if he could help it. “I can fight ‘n shoot just fine.”

Reyes snapped back to attention, glancing over at him. “I know. You clipped my shoulder, actually,” he said, nonchalant. Jesse stopped breathing. Not quite expecting a fight, yet, but more expecting the precursor to one. It didn’t come. “I say it as a good thing, kid. You’re not incapable, or anything. That’s not what I’m saying.” He glanced down to his own hands. “The recruits have military training. Just out of basic. In order to fight on their level, you need to know how they do it. The good ones are the ones who figure out how to fight dirty, smart, but for a while, they’re just predictable. Predictable shithouses, sure, but still. We spar them with Blackwatch agents to learn how to be clever about it. You already got that part, or you’re at least on your way to it.”

Jesse listened, carefully remaining very quiet as he did so. Reyes talked a lot. Not that he minded, really; he’d gotten good at listening to his superiors monologue a long time ago. What he said, though, that was… surprising, to say the least. Not only had he just been praised for shooting his new commander, but also for having no sense of discipline or honorable combat. Which was dumb anyway, in his opinion, but military people were supposed to be big on that, or so he thought.

“What about the ones who don’t learn it?” he asked, tentative. 

Reyes shrugged. “They don’t do field work. If they have a problem with it, they go to Overwatch.” He blew a breath through his nose, like a smoker. “I won’t lie, Blackwatch isn’t easy to get into. Especially not the field. Our missions are dangerous-- I’m not putting just anybody out there. Not gonna get some private killed because they wanted to be in the black ops division but didn’t have the skill.”  
Jesse stared back at him. “Then why even offer?” 

It was an honest question, really. He had the pick of actual, trained recruits who applied for this. Signed up for it of their own volition. Didn’t shoot their commander, yet. Weren’t criminals. And yet, he extended the chance to Jesse.

“I just told you. You’re a…” he swung his hands around, looking for the word. “Special case?”

“Because I should be in prison.”

Reyes snorted. “No no. You’re not the only one, kid. Blackwatch is full of second, third, all-kinds-of chances.” He shrugged. “You’re young, though. You have the potential to be a lot of things. Sending you to prison cuts those things down to ‘jaded beyond help’ and ‘dead.’”

“So a charity case.” Jesse wasn’t really upset, or angry about the fact. He’d figured. Ached a little, just below his breastbone. 

“No. You’re not.”

Paused. He looked up.

“Just being a kid in a gang doesn’t mean much. What made-- makes you different is that you were better than half the grown-ass adults around, and everyone knew it. Your bounty is bigger than your superior, you know. You said her name was Montego?” He nodded. “Never heard of her. She fell under the ‘extra reward for captains and supervisors.’ You, though-- you had your own posters. Did you know that?”

He didn’t. He had entirely no clue. It made sense, considering how much everyone seemed to hate him. All the comments, from Montego and Stone especially, about how he wasn’t worth a thing. But they _lied_. Jesse’s heart tripped over itself, bubbling over into what might have been actual pride, twisted as it was. He was only meaningful as a criminal, sure, but he was worth something. 

“So I gave you a chance because I know you could work, in Blackwatch. Maybe not in the field, if you don’t want, but you’d be more than good enough to hit the ranks.”

More than good enough, he said.

Some of the people in Deadlock were nice to him, sometimes. When he minded his business and held up his bargains, like everyone else. They’d call him a good shot, or that they were glad he was on their side. But never ‘more than good enough.’ He hadn’t heard anything like that since he'd left home. 

Jesse remained silent, after that, and Reyes did the same. The winding hallway, still lined with doors, opened up then, into a larger room with an open window and artificial lighting. Entering the space hit him with the smell of pine needles and dirt and cold air, all of it lanced through by the stench of antiseptics. He considered going closer to the window, but was interrupted by the silvery doors swinging open, revealing a medical-something he’d feel rude assuming anything to, dressed in white scrubs and clutching a clipboard to their chest.

“Commander Reyes!” 

Reyes strolled past Jesse to the...nurse? Attendant? Whoever was standing at the doors, taking the clipboard from their hands without looking up, already beginning to write.

“That’s me,” he grunted. 

The...whoever chuckled softly, briefly shaking their head. “I’ve noticed. Ah, but is something the matter? You were treated upon returning, no? Are you feeling alright?”

They rolled their hands together, watching the commander with a kind of rapt attention. Not fear, though. Excitement, maybe, or some blend of nervousness and glee, like seeing a celebrity. Which would make sense, since Reyes was an actual celebrity, kind of.

Reyes handed the clipboard back over. “I’m fine. Got a new agent, though. Shrapnel lacerations on the hands and face, probably came into contact with infectious substances, some bruising. Not entirely sure the whole scope.” He jerked a shoulder back at Jesse, who straightened from where he’d pressed himself into the windowframe. The medic glanced at him for a moment, but continued to address their questions to Reyes. 

“Vaccinations? Allergies?” they asked. 

Reyes turned and looked at Jesse, one eyebrow raised. 

“Huh? Oh! Uh, vaccines, right. I have… some? The required ones you get every so often. Not all of ‘em, though. Up until twelve years old, maybe? Thirteen?” 

The medic scribbled it down. “And allergies?”

He shrugged. “Don’t think so. Raw bell peppers make my mouth itch.”

They snorted. “Alright. Any pre-existing conditions or medications?”

“No,” he lied, very evenly. Tamped down on the roiling, slimy fear trying to crawl up his throat.

Reyes nodded, once, turning back to the medic. “Alright. You have time to run a physical?”

“Do you? I assumed you were accompanying commander Morrison on the transport carrier.” 

Reyes stopped moving. “What carrier?” he asked, very slowly.

The agent paled a little. “Ah, he and agent Lindholm intended on taking it back to one of the central bases, if I heard correctly.” They clapped their hands over their mouth, very nearly slamming the clipboard into their forehead. “Not that I was eavesdropping. I would never. I’m sorry, Commander, it was not my place to--”

He didn’t give them a chance to finish, digging his hands into his hair beneath the beanie and very nearly snarling. Jesse curled into the window. “Dammit, Jack,” he spat. “Fuck.” Pointed at the still-silent medic, who startled. “I need a med kit. Standard, light, whatever. Stitches, disinfectant, and bandages.”

They scrabbled back through the doors and re-emerged less than a second later, shoving a white, rectangular box into Reyes’ hands. He muttered a seemingly unconscious ‘thank you’ as he whipped around to face Jesse, who also startled. “Pack it up, kid, we need to move,” he barked. “You ever ridden a plane before?” 

Jesse had not, in fact, ever ridden a plane before. He liked the idea, though. Thought they were neat. If he were better at math, he might have been interested in aerodynamics. Why did he ask? Jesse knew next to nothing about planes. Probably would have said so if he were less terrified, or if things were happening at a speed that he could comprehend. “I can't fly a plane," he blurted.

“What?" Reyes shook his head, violently. "No, have you _ridden_ a plane? Been in a plane, at least. Like, from an airport? Window seats. Your seat is a flotation device. Wait, no, fuck. Ignore what I just said. Whatever, there's a first time for everything." He waved for Jesse to follow him, pushing the white box into his cut hands and moving down the hallway. "Let's go."

"Take a left at the next, ah... place! The turn!" the medic yelped.

"Thank you!" Jesse shouted over his shoulder without thinking, swinging himself around the wide doorway to stay caught up. 

Beneath he jostling of the items in the kit, the oddness of the new clothes, the omnipresent dread hanging off his skin, he almost could have thought he was excited for something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh? from day one i was excited about genji. i love him. he comes in later but itl prolly be a while and im sad, bc hes the knife cat emoji and i love him very much
> 
> but when he does show up its rly Extra  
> i think,,, a long ways off tho. idk i could be 50668% wrong n he shows up in like 2 chapters i aint got a clue wot im doing lads   
> but PROBABLY its a while  
> hell be here tho


	9. 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its a lil choppy my bad
> 
> i tried to smooth it out w another draft but it. was Bad and four drafts is enough lmao
> 
> in other unsuprising news, i still dont know how 2 end a chapter

The first plane ride was, as a whole,solidly ‘alright’. It was painfully tense between Reyes and Morrison, but Jesse’d bonded a little with Torbjorn over shared, awkward glances across the carrier as they watched the two commanders go back and forth like a tennis match. The carrier itself wasn’t so bad either, after he got a handle on the shaking and hum of the engines. For a while, though, he was practically fused to his seat, white-knuckled on his harness with his shoulders pressed all the way up against his ears. Reyes and Morrison stood the whole flight.

Once he relaxed, though, Jesse got a chance to clean up and bandage his hands properly-- or as properly as he really could. He was fairly sure he’d wrapped them wrong, like a boxer instead of a medic, but it’d work fine for the time being. The pilot said she’d be dropping off he and Reyes in New York, where she’d set up for another, smaller plane, piloted by a woman named Rosie, to take them the rest of the way to Gibraltar, while Morrison and Torbjorn headed to Zurich. There’d been an argument about that, too, but he and Torbjorn had just dramatically pantomimed it at one another until Morrison caught them and told them to knock it off. Jesse figured Reyes already knew, and didn’t say anything. 

Halfway through, Jesse quietly slipped into the plane’s bathroom and wrapped the remainder of his bandages around his middle, where the worst of the gashes had been, carefully hidden from everyone thusfar. At least one would need stitches, and he considered doing it himself, but a bout of turbulence convinced him otherwise. He worried, though. Hoped they wouldn’t slow him down any, especially with all the training Reyes was talking about. Failing meant no Blackwatch, and, considering Morrison’s increasingly sunny attitude towards him, no Blackwatch meant prison. He couldn’t afford to be injured. 

The carrier touched down in New York and, as soon as it did, Reyes and Jesse were off the plane, marching along the asphalt directly to a much smaller, sleeker jet without any kind of identification. Rosie, it turned out, was a friendly woman with a head of short, curly brown hair and nails painted bright red. The plane was tiny, compared to the carrier. The only space was the cockpit, with only two seats (one of which occupied by Rosie), and a very tiny hallway that led to a very tiny bathroom, with two tiny beds nestled into the walls across from one another. 

Reyes made him sit in the copilot’s chair for takeoff. He tried to protest, but the man had leveled him with a Look, and Jesse complied. Reyes stood behind him, one hand braced on the seat and the other on the ceiling, and he stumbled only a little bit when the plane got off the ground. He kept Jesse planted in the seat with a hand on his shoulder, only letting him up once they hit cruising altitude.

“Scoot over, kid. I’m stealing your seat for a while.”

Rosie chuckled as Jesse scrambled upright, knocking into the walls of the tiny space to fit where Reyes had been standing. She leaned back in her chair to look up at him, smiling. 

“Hey. There’s two beds behind you-- you’re welcome to sit down.” Her voice was soft and accented from somewhere he couldn’t place. 

“I’m alright,” he lied. He really would have liked to sit down, and a bed sounded downright amazing, but he didn’t much feel like testing his luck, here.

Reyes folded his arms and tipped his head down, eyes closed.

“Go get some rest, Mccree. It’s a long flight. That’s an order,” he pointed out, as Jesse opened his mouth to protest. 

He eventually complied, tucking himself to sit on the little cot, bending over so he didn’t hit his head on the compartment overhead. He gently picked at the bandages covering his knuckles, not enough to disturb them, but enough to have something for his hands to do. He sat for a while there, not making a sound. Hated to admit it, but he was tired. The last day had been an… exciting one, to say the least. He caught himself swaying where he sat more than once, jerking upright and going back to fidgeting to stay awake. 

“Go to sleep, babydoll,” Rosie called from her seat, though she didn’t really need to. The engines of the jet were much quieter than the carrier’s, even if the buzz under his feet was stronger. He could hear her just fine, along with the music that floated out of the radio on her dashboard. A language he didn’t understand. Don’t do it, his mind warned him. You don’t know her. Barely know Reyes. But he was _tired_. The jet was cool. His uniform was warm. The soft hum of the plane in flight made his body feel comfortably floaty. If he got murdered in his sleep, he figured that might be alright. Disappointing as all hell, but alright, all things considered.

“Do… should I take my shoes off?” he mumbled, twisting his hands together. He didn’t have the energy to be confident, not now. 

She laughed, warm and friendly. “Sure thing, baby. Whatever you want.”

He did pull his boots off, setting them neatly in a line beside the bed. He had to curl his knees a little in order to fit, but he didn’t mind. He pulled his hat off and considered setting it on one of his boots, but instead opted to hold it to his chest, letting the soft familiarity of it keep him in the bubble of quiet calm he’d formed. The intensified sound of the engines startled him, at first, when he set his ear down on the pillow, but he relaxed into it, letting the white noise lull him into a doze.  
He faded in and out of consciousness throughout the flight, his whole body feeling warm and sleep-fuzzy every time he came to. The first time, it was to the sound of Reyes and Rosie chatting quietly in the same language as the radio, broken occasionally by one of them laughing or sighing. The second, he found a worn blanket pulled over his shoulders, smelling like something sweet-spicy and homely. Reyes was awkwardly crammed into the bunk across from him, too big by far to fit comfortably. In the cockpit, Rosie had turned up her radio and it was the tinny noise, bouncing along the metal walls and filling the plane at a comfortable volume, that dragged him back under. The third, Reyes was back in the cockpit with her, but they weren’t talking. Just sitting in silence, the radio stringing between. It took him a moment to realize Reyes was humming along. For a moment, Jesse was back home, sleeping on the sofa in the living room while his mother and father moved around the kitchen, humming and softly singing songs between each other. It ached, in a way. He chose to be selfish and stayed in the rosy memory, letting it be what tucked him into another sleep. The pillow felt damp under his eyes.

He woke up the last time when Reyes tapped his shoulder, startling a little at the contact.

“Sorry, kid. We’re about an hour out.”

“Alright,” he slurred. Rosie chuckled from her seat. 

“Come sit by me, sleepy,” she said, patting the copilot’s chair beside her. As Jesse pulled his boots back on and messily folded the blanket he’d been given, Reyes took the opposite bunk, muttering darkly about a crick in his neck. 

Rosie smiled at him when Jesse sat down beside her. Pointed at the radio.

“You can put on something else, if you want.”

“Naw, I. This is nice.”

She reached over and tugged the brim of his hat over his face and he sputtered, caught off guard but, oddly enough, not scared.

“Hey. Good morning,” she teased.

Jesse shuffled his hat back into place on his mussed hair and grinned back at her, only a little sleepily.

“Yeah, yeah. Bully the cowboy.”

She tipped her head back and laughed, at that. 

They sat in silence for the remainder of the flight, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Rosie shrugged apologetically at him, about halfway through, and pulled her earphones properly over her head, occasionally speaking into the little microphone to someone over the line. Jesse didn’t spend any time to find out who. He was far more invested in the view. The Gibraltar base was settled on the cliffs just outside what he figured was a wilderness preserve, shiny glass and clever geometric architecture against the rough and organic terrain of the cliffs, carved out by the ocean that crashed up against them. The closer they got, the more clearly he could make out a few people running and walking around the pathways outside and over the tarmac, which was lined with aircrafts and bustling like a nest of ants. The landing caught him only a little off guard. 

“Rise and shine, Reyes!” Rosie shouted over her shoulder, driving the little jet into one of the empty vehicle bays. 

“Yeah, yeah, Rosie. I’m up,” Reyes grumbled back, working at his shoulder and wincing. “Come on, kid. Let’s go get you oriented.”

To his surprise, Rosie got off the plane with them, walking alongside for a little while before she ruffled Jesse’s hair beneath his hat and lazily saluted Reyes, going her own direction.

“Thanks for the lift, Rosie,” Reyes said.

“Anytime, boss,” she said back, waving.

Jesse absently waved back. The sun was up, just barely, and comfortably warm. People buzzed around them, more than were at the Grand Mesa airstrip, by a lot. It made him less uneasy than he expected. A few would smile at Reyes when they saw him, and he smiled at them in return. Eventually they came to a pair of massive silver doors inside the covered part of the airfield, and they slid open, depositing a handful of agents who either beamed at Reyes as he passed, or hurriedly scuttled away. It was an elevator, he realized, and it was nothing short of fucking massive. Could easily hold thirty people, at least. It spat out Jesse, Reyes, and some others at the next level. He followed the commander through the hallways, people watching and thinking. The majority of agents he’d seen thusfar were all dressed in blue, but the further they went into the base, the less populated it seemed. Another pair of elevator doors were at the end of the hall, this time printed with the same symbol on the bicep of his uniform.

“I’ll warn you,” Reyes began, ushering Jesse into the elevator. “Most of the field agents loiter around the mess hall when they have nothing to do, and they can be a little… overwhelming. You can stand by the doors if it makes you feel better.”

“‘Overwhelming’ how?”

Reyes didn’t get a chance to answer before the doors slid open again, revealing a huge, high-ceilinged room that smelled like breakfast foods and gunpowder, not packed but not sparsely populated, filled with black-uniformed agents, most of which wearing the same kind of gear that Jesse was. Field agents, he assumed. Even without the uniforms, they were easy to spot, visibly painted with a network of scars, skin weathered from time spent outside. Also, generally the loudest.  
Some chatted among one another, others yelled amicably from different corners of the room, a handful looked to be bartering with the kitchen staff, one was trying to cram an entire pancake in their mouth while another recorded it, and both were surrounded by a circle of cheering compatriots. 

“Boss!” someone shouted, and every head seemed to turn at once, making Jesse feel at once too big and too small. He covertly shuffled a step behind Reyes, feeling his blood start to push adrenaline through his veins. He was more than a little upset to see the calm from the flight start to go. He’d missed being reasonably high-strung. A large chunk of the agents got up and beelined for their commander, some even vaulting over tables and shoving at one another to get close. The one who was eating pancakes looked a little like they were choking, but ran forward anyway.

A chorus of “Boss!” “Jefe!” “Patron!” and what he assumed were other multilingual variants filled the room. Hands reached for Reyes form seemingly every direction, not harmful, but definitely intimidating. To Jesse, at least. Reyes didn’t seem at all concerned. Happy, if anything.

“Yeah, yeah. Get off me, you ingrates,” Reyes snorted, but he was smiling. Ruffled the hair of some agents who were close enough.

“We missed you!” someone cried, and a chunk of the crowd cheered in agreement.

“Uh-huh. I missed you too. Don’t tell anyone,” Reyes said. “Cut the sappy shit, though. Someone get me a report.”  
As soon as the order went out, the crowd stood back in a more orderly configuration, but most were still grinning.

“Where’s Ezra?” someone shouted from the back.

As if on cue, the crowd parted around a slight but tall man, loosely holding a holopad to his chest as he stepped forward. He moved with purpose, but without any sense of anxiety. High-ranking, probably.

“I haven’t seen him,” the man said, raising an eyebrow. His eyes looked almost gold against his skin, darker brown than Reyes’.

“Ezra. Good to see you. Give me the good news, and leave the complaints on top of my paper shredder, as usual. Make it fast, I have work to do, and so do you.”

“How exciting. I’m doing fine, by the way.” He looked down at his holopad. “In your absence, Blackwatch completed thirteen total field missions, with eight casualties, five of which are in the infirmary with relatively noncritical injuries.” He smiled at Reyes. “No deaths.”

Reyes clapped his hands together, flashing a feral grin at the agents around him. “That’s what I like to hear!” he shouted, and Jesse swore the whole room cheered with him.

It dazzled him, to be honest. He wanted to be a part of it so bad he could feel it in his fingertips, could feel it bouncing along the underside of his ribcage and entirely choking him for breath. These were strangers, all of them, and he couldn’t hope to know each and every one, to trust them safely. But they couldn’t do the same for him, either. They had to rely on something blind. The part of Jesse that was rational begged him to run, to turn around and sprint in the opposite direction, find a place that was safe and quiet to hide away from a dangerous world. But the part of him that got into trouble, though, the part that’d joined Deadlock in the first place, that was swept in by the passion of the people all around him, each fighting for something different but all the same in how badly they wanted it, the part that lived to pull the trigger, feel the shock of it sing up his arm and straight to his heart; that part of him _loved_ it. Loved Blackwatch already. Momentarily didn’t care what the organization did, so long as it meant he could be a part of the frenzied sea of people around him. 

One woman at the edge of the mass glanced over him and did a brief double take, settling on him and grinning. The other woman beside her winked and mimed tipping a hat.

Jesse winked and tipped his hat, and the women fell into one another, laughing. 

And with that, Jesse was 100% completely and entirely sold on Blackwatch.

“Alright, show’s over, idiots,” Reyes barked, ruffling the hair of the man standing next to him, who grinned. “Go do your jobs.”

The crowd, for the most part, did dissipate, save for Ezra and the two women, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.

“Rodriguez, Augustin, what do you need?”

One of them, a lady with shaved-off red hair, was the first to speak. 

“Nothing, hoss. We wanna say hi to the new kid.”  
Reyes raised an eyebrow at Jesse, who thought he might have been going into shock. Somebody wanted to talk to him? To Jesse. Jesse Mccree. The loser in a cowboy hat. Why? It was entirely freakish to think about, sure, but like with Rosie, though, he found himself feeling oddly… unafraid. As if he didn’t need to use the ‘southern charm’ as a survival tactic, but instead just a way to make friends. He didn’t have to calculate the best way to interact with these people. Plain and simple, he didn’t feel threatened. Which didn’t at all make sense, especially considering the nebula of scars over both women’s faces, nicks and callouses on their fingers from handling knives and sharp objects, pink-white waves on their knuckles from hitting things. Even considering all of it, they didn’t scare him.

“Howdy,” he drawled, tipping his hat again. Augustin and Rodriguez, as Reyes had called them, started laughing again. Not at him, though. The redhead spoke up again.

“Bossman, where’d you find this guy? I love him.”

Reyes snorted. “Interrogation. Same place I found you.”

She bowed forward laughing, letting the other woman hold her up. Straightened, then lightly punched Jesse in the arm. He twitched, only a little bit.

“Hey, cowboy. Good luck digging out of the life of crime. Turning over a new leaf’s a bitch, but you might get a super hot girlfriend out of it.” She punctuated the last bit by pressing a loud, smacking kiss to the other lady’s cheek. She spluttered a raspberry at the redhead and shoved her sideways, laughing.

“Didn’t I tell you two to go do your jobs?” Reyes asked. “Get out of here before you scar the recruit.”

The duo wrapped their arms around each other and made dramatic, obnoxious kissing noises until Reyes shooed them off, the shave-headed woman sticking out her tongue and her girlfriend waving her hands against her ears. Jesse chucked. 

“What ya got against young love, Reyes?” he pouted.

The commander tugged the brim of Jesse’s hat over his eyes.

“Don’t you start too.”

Jesse jumped as Ezra cleared his throat. Forgotten he was there, to be honest. 

“You said I had work to do, Gabriel?”

"Oh. Right. So, first of all..."


	10. 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a brief summary is that jess meets angela n gets his hands and some cuts on his stomach all taken care of, n gets an immune booster but it gives him a p nasty panic attack, he works thru it n gets to be p alright friends w angie!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CONTENT WARNING !!!!!!**  
>  jess does have a panic attack in this one n its from his perspective so please read w discretion!!  
> a majority of this chapter also takes place in a medical setting, n its a medical scenario that triggers the attack!!
> 
> pls take care of yrselves !!! if anyone'd like ill add a chapter 10.5 that summarizes this one more in-depth if u dont wanna/cant read!!
> 
>  
> 
> also:: less than 3 weeks between updates???? whys that??? bc im on a roll and hav no concept of regular update schedules !!!!!!! yeet!!

“Walk and talk, Ezra.”

“Of course, commander,” said man replied. He moved like water, fluidly turning and flicking through a blue-screened holopad, like Reyes’.

“How did it go?”

“Chaotic, as per usual. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“I know that. Why I picked you for this job,” Reyes pointed out. Ezra laughed, musical and floaty. “Nobody give you trouble?”

“No one ever does. Our agents are more than respectful of my authority, since it came from you.” He chuckled, a little mischievous. “All the Overwatch supervisors are too scared of what the field teams would do to try giving me grief.”

Reyes snorted. “Thinking smart, for once.”

“You said I had work?”

“Right. Right. I need an open room for Mccree.”

At the sound of his name, Jesse stumbled. Ezra briefly looked over his shoulder and smiled.

He pulled up what looked like a floorplan on the holopad, lines of multicolored and numbered boxes along the schematic of a building, all the way up to four hundred. Jesse didn’t know what building it was. Maybe this one, but he had no idea how big the Gibraltar base was, or how the layout looked, or how many floors there were. He knew jack shit, really. Most of the boxes were an off shade of blue from the rest of the floorplan, but about half were yellow, and one or two were red.

“Two-fifty and up are all mostly unoccupied.”

“I was hoping for something closer. You got anything under 100?”

“Sixty-six is open.”

“Thought that was Miller.”

“She moved into Haden’s, in eighty-four.”

“Of course she did. I’ll have to remember to get them a rice cooker, or something.”

“We have two in the main community kitchen.”

“I know what I said.”

Ezra chuckled, shaking his head. “Landi’s in twenty-seven, but he’s looking for a transfer.”

“He say why?”

“Too loud. Lowman keeps getting nightmares, since the mission in Turkey.”

Reyes paused. “Aren’t you in twenty-six?”

“I am. Friedman’s been on the transfer list a bit longer, but I figured our friend could use a resource, should you need it.” He turned over his shoulder and directed the last part at Jesse. 

“Uh. Ok,” he mumbled. Hadn’t been really thinking about being a part of the conversation. Too busy snooping. Ezra turned back to Reyes.

“Other surrounding occupants are Ramirez, Baxter, Foss, and Guan.”

“Which Baxter?”

“Thomas. Louise is in fifty-four.”

“Alright. Move Landi and put in Mccree.”

Ezra tapped along the screen. “Done. How soon do you need him out by?”

“Dinner, ideally. Still need to get Mccree to the med bay, tour him through a little later.” Reyes rubbed a hand over his chin. “I still need to submit a report.”

Ezra waved a hand. “I’ll tour, Gabriel. You do paperwork.”

“You sure?”

“You’re asking me if I’m _sure_ I don’t want to do paperwork.”

“Fair point. How busy is the med bay?”

“Definitely crowded, but not unmanageable. I’d actually suggest going to Dr. Ziegler upstairs.”

“Mercy’s a surgeon, and she’s Overwatch.”

“Not technically; critical procedures are simply what she’s most often called for. Besides,” he shot Jesse a glance. “I think Mccree could benefit from talking with someone about his own age.”

Reyes frowned. “Don’t remember saying how old he was.”

“I have eyes, Gabriel.”

He scoffed, knocked Ezra lightly with his shoulder.

“Shut up. That’s an order.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Smartass.”

“Blackwatch seems to attract us, it seems. I’ll talk to Landi and send you a message when I’ve finished.” He punctuated the statement by waving his holopad. 

“Keep me updated. Mccree, follow me. We’re going back upstairs, apparently.”

Jesse jerked again at his own name, but less so than before. He’d been trying to pay better attention this time. 

“Uh. Alright.”

They split off from Ezra, going in a different direction than the one they’d come. Passed through a maze of hallways lined with metal doors, all with plaques printed with names and numbers. A living room-looking space, too, in which he glimpsed a handful of people sitting on a sofa, chatting quietly with others sitting on the countertop of a kitchenette.

After a while, they came to a stairwell rather than an elevator, and two flights up brought them back to hallways and rooms printed with the Overwatch logo. Jesse followed Reyes a little blindly, letting his mind wander. 

Ezra was definitely a superior of some kind, high-ranking despite not seeming to be a field agent. To Jesse, it didn’t make much sense. Deadlock picked its branch heads based on brains, sure, but between a smart member with a weak stomach and a duller one more prone to violence, the mean one would win over, every time. Ezra didn’t seem particularly violent, but he could have been wrong. Not being a field agent would have put a damper on his kill count, though, wouldn’t it? And if that were the case, why would Reyes pick a successor who was only halfway up the pecking order? All it would do would make issues with the loudmouths and monsters who thought they deserved the promotion more, and then he'd have a coup on his hands. Reyes’ methods confused him, but. He was alive, so they had to work somehow.

The heavy stench of antiseptic and bright white walls knocked him out of his head as he gaped around a tiny medbay, not at all what he had in mind upon hearing 'Overwatch medical site.' There were only a few beds and two silvery examination tables, every other flat surface in the room covered in layers of papers and folders. Dr. Ziegler, Ezra had called the doctor. Reyes called her Mercy. In his head, he envisioned a tall, bony older woman with hair sheared short or knotted in a tight bun, who cared less about the patients, themselves, and more about getting them out as fast as possible. Like a stern librarian, but with a scalpel.

“Mercy? You got a minute?” Reyes called into the empty room. From somewhere beyond a dividing wall, Jesse heard the sound of a sink turning on, then off.

“One moment, Gabriel!”

Something smelled a little sweet, under all the antiseptic.

From around the corner came a young woman, shorter than Jesse with blonde hair and skin somehow whiter than even Morrison’s. Upon seeing Jesse, her dewy eyes got impossibly larger.

“Oh. Who’re you?”

“New recruit. You have time for a physical?”

She kept her gaze focused on Jesse, still enough to make him want to squirm a little. 

“Sure.” Stuck out a hand. “I’m Angela Ziegler. You can call me Dr. Ziegler, or Mercy, if you’d like.”

She looked… young. Maybe even his own age. Round faced and sharp-chinned, with a nose that turned up at the end and downy blonde hair hugging the sides of her head. Far clearer skinned than Jesse, but still pocked with little red dots of acne. There were dark circles under her eyes. Looking down at her arm implied real strength behind it, stocky and hairier than his own. She probably could have picked him up, despite his having a few inches on her.

_Manners_ , his mother’s voice hissed in his ear, and he jerked up his hand to meet her own.

“Jesse Mccree,” he choked out, clumsily tipping his hat. Her hands were still damp, but warm.

They stood like that for an uncomfortably long moment, both staring analytically at the other. Dr. Ziegler looked at him like a puzzle, and it set him on edge, only because he disliked the idea of being solved. He didn’t mind the social “rudeness” the gesture implied, though, seeing as he was doing the exact same thing.

Reyes cleared his throat, and Jesse jumped back as if burned. Ziegler let her hand fall to her side.

“Well. That was in no way painful to watch.” He lightly patted Jesse’s shoulder. “Uh. Have fun socializing. Mercy, there should be a partly-finished report on him already; I sent it to you earlier.” Took an awkward step back. “Comm me when you’re done, I’ll come back.”

And Reyes took his leave. Jesse only halfway watched him go, partially focused on Ziegler’s pulling out a holopad and scrolling through it, pausing occasionally to shake out her hand. There were angry red splits at the tips of her fingers, alongside little scars that looked to have been from similar injuries. After a few repetitions of the movement, Jesse piped up.

“If you glue ‘em, they don’t split so bad.” He pointed at her hand, and Ziegler looked up.

“Sorry?”

“The, um. Your hands. They’re splitting, right? If you use some superglue on them, they heal up better.”

She shrugged. “I wash my hands so much it doesn’t make a difference.”

Jesse felt his face heat up. Right. Obviously. She’s a doctor, for chrissake. Of course she’d thought of that before. Stupid.

She pointed at one of the metal examination tables. 

“Sit down, please.”

Jesse did as he was told. The surface was less cold than he expected, what with the new uniform. He really loved his uniform. 

Ziegler stepped in front of him and looked over his face again, not saying anything. He took the opportunity to do the same, noting the fact that both her eyelashes and eyebrows were the same blonde as her hair, a few shades more saturated than Morrison’s. Her nose curved down her face and tipped up at the end, and it made him think of a pixie.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-three,” he lied, same as in the interrogation room. Ziegler looked a little disappointed.

“Oh. I’m seventeen.”

Seventeen years old and a licensed doctor. She’d probably saved lives and advanced science somehow, judging by all the papers lying around. And what had Jesse done? Dressed up like a cowboy and killed people.

“Me too,” he blurted. “I lied.”

She accepted it without hesitation. “Are you a genius, too?”

A genius. The way she acted made a whole lot more sense, now.

“Not even close. Sorry, sugar.”

She made a little ‘hmm’ noise under her breath, looking back over the holopad. Not like she was disappointed or unimpressed, just a ‘hmm’ noise.

“You don’t know if you’ve been vaccinated?”

“Not really.”

Tapped away again at the holopad. 

“Are you on any drugs? I won’t get you in trouble, I just need to know so I don’t kill you on accident.”

“No,” he lied. 

“Medications?”

“Nope.” If it killed him, he didn’t mind. Better than the alternative. 

“Anything I should know about?”

“My hands are cut up a bit. Got some ugly ones on my gut.”

She grabbed his hands from his lap without asking, undoing the bandages and unraveling in seconds what had taken Jesse a few minutes. Turned each one over, lightly pressed her thumb against some of the larger cuts. They looked a lot better than they had before, just barely pink around the edges and not bleeding. 

She nodded to herself and stood back a bit.

“A brief biotic treatment and they’ll be fine. Shirt off, please, so I can get to the rest.”

“Uh. Is that… are you sure? I can do it myself if you…”

“I don’t care, Jesse. It doesn’t bother me.”

It’d been awhile since anyone used his first name, and he startled a little at hearing it. Ziegler said his taking off his shirt wasn’t going to bother her, which was great, but. It bothered him. A lot, actually.

He fidgeted with his fingers. “Could I, um. Keep my shirt on?” he mumbled, a lot meeker than he’d intended.

Ziegler shrugged. “Whatever you like, so long as I can get to your injuries.”

He carefully rolled up his shirt just enough to reach the bandages underneath, starting to turn a weak shade of red in some spots. He grimaced. Ziegler pulled on a pair of gloves and hooked a pair of scissors under the wrapping, and he flinched at the cold. She pulled away the bandages and pressed her fingers to his middle without much warning, and he fought the instinctual urge to knee her in the jaw.

“You need stitches,” she pointed out, already turning around and digging through the drawers of a grey cabinet. The upper shelves were covered by glass doors and lined with bottles.

“I know.”

Ziegler turned back with a needle held in one hand and a spool of thread in the other. The needle was packaged in a red plastic case sealed with a sticker that read ‘sterile.’

“If you come in twice daily for a biotic treatment, they should be out in a few days.”

“I’ll be honest, sweetheart. I got no idea that that means.”

“Angela.”

“Pardon?”

She glanced at the floor. “You can call me Angela.”

“You said earlier to-- shit. I’m sorry. Did the ‘sweetheart’ thing make you uncomfortable? It kinda slipped out without thinkin’. I’ll stop now, if you want.”

She looked back at him, blue eyes unerring in contact with his. He twitched. 

“No. I don’t care about that. You’re the only person who’s really talked to me in a while. And you’re a teenager, too. So you can call me Angela.”  
He felt a little guilty. He hadn’t said much other than responding to what she asked him. It occurred to him then that Angela probably didn’t have many friends. He might not have been a genius doctor, but not having friends, he could fix.

“Well aren’t I special?” he cooed, batting his eyelashes and holding his hat against his chest. Angela spluttered out a bark of laughter, like she was surprised to be laughing at all.

She was back to being all business a moment later. Hefted the needle in her hand. “This is going to hurt.”

“Yup.”

“Do you want a painkiller? I can give you a local anesthetic, if you’re not allergic.”

“Aside from the fact I have no idea what I’m allergic to--” Angela snorted. “I’ll be fine without one.” 

“Are you sure?” she raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to play tough.”

“I ain’t playing.” He flexed his arms above his head, fully aware of how underwhelming it looked. “I’m just that tough.”

Angela barked out a laugh again and stabbed him with the needle. 

By the time she’d finished, Jesse’d nearly bit through his own lip, and his hands now sported little shell-shaped divots where he’d dug his nails into them, but he felt better now not having his stomach cut open. 

Angela dropped the needle in a garbage can labeled ‘MEDICAL WASTE’ and put the remaining thread back in the drawer she’d got it from. When she turned around again, she held what looked like a white pen with a light at the end, like the kind they used at the eye doctor’s. The only difference was that this one was very neatly printed with a silver and yellow band at the top.

She set it down beside her holopad and walked across the room, rooting around in another cupboard for something. When she returned, she did so with a worryingly massive needle. Suddenly, Jesse found himself breaking out in a thin layer of cold sweat. He wasn’t particularly afraid of needles normally, but this needle. This needle terrified him. She could kill someone with it. Like, bludgeon them to death with the barrel of this _fucking_ needle. 

“This one is really going to hurt.”

“I just decided you’re not allowed to come to my funeral, after you kill me with that.”

“What happened to being tough?”

“I’m tough, Angie. Not a god.”

Angela laughed out loud again, tipping her head back and scrunching up her nose. She had a snaggletooth on one side of her mouth that stuck out just a little odd against the rest of her teeth.

“Count down from ten and close your eyes."

He took a deep breath. “Ten. Nine, eight, seven, si--”

She jammed the needle into his arm, and he screamed. Actually took a swing at her, this time, but she snatched his wrist before it could connect.

“FUCKING FUCK MOTHER OF SHIT FUCKING GODDAMN SHIT _FUCK_ ,” he shrieked, as she pushed the plunger down. When she let him go, he lurched away, curling up around his arm and pressing up against the wall.

“What in the freshly blessed hell was in that thing, Angela?”

“An immune booster. It’s a more effective way of delivering all the immunizations you’d need otherwise.”

“Is it supposed to burn?” 

She shrugged. “For some people. Others say it feels too cold. I can’t give you anything for it, though.”

To her credit, she did look a little guilty.

“How long does it last?” he wheezed.

“A few minutes, on average.”

“A few-- how long? Being shot doesn’t even hurt this bad!”

His eyes actually started welling up, to his horror.

“Sorry,” Angela cringed, and she looked genuinely guilty, this time. “Give me your hands?”

Jesse tentatively shuffled back forward, pushing his non-burning hand towards her. His left arm felt like it was fucking melting, and the feeling only spread. He couldn’t feel his fingers at all, only a singular, white mass of pain. It crawled up into the ball of his shoulder, and he bit his lip hard enough to bleed. He could hardly think. What he was capable of thinking, though, was all awful. His mind was apparently only capable enough to be animalistically terrified. Angela had seemed nice, if strange. And that was understandable, considering she was a child genius with no one to talk to. But she was nice to Jesse, in her own way. Or at least, he’d thought so. She hadn’t come off to him with any warning signs, no red flashing lights in his head or gut-deep apprehension from being around her. But, his mind gasped. But what if we were _wrong_? Wrong about Reyes, and Kvonch, and Torbjorn, and Angela, about all of them. What if they wanted to hurt us, and had from the beginning? What if this was your punishment? What if they were going to torture us with this until you told them everything about Deadlock? He already told them everything about Deadlock! They don’t know that, his horrible brain sobbed. They could think you’re holding out. What if this isn’t the worst? If it gets worse and worse and worse until we die? What if we _can’t_ die?

“...Jesse?”

Angela’s voice ripped him out of the cycle, and he found himself heaving massive breaths through his lungs, now on fire with the same sensation in his arm. Every breath felt blissfully cool one moment, but like swallowing needles the next. 

One of Angela’s hands was wrapped around his own, the other holding the little light pen, shining gold on his palm. The palm of his ruined, searing arm. Upon looking at it, though, a very distant part of him registered the lack of cuts over his hands, replaced now with barely-there pink lines of new skin like that under the mostly healed scabs he’d pick off when he was nervous. 

“You can cry, if you need to. It’ll make you feel better, honestly. I. I didn’t think it would be this bad. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Jesse could only make a strangled noise in his throat and curl up tighter into his legs, letting fat tears bubble over his eyes. He didn’t care enough to be embarrassed about it. He _hurt_. And it wasn’t the hurt that was so bad. It was the overwhelming and irrational sureness in his head that it would never stop. That it wouldn’t get better, but more the opposite, that it would only escalate until he ceased to be anything but the sensation of being torn apart. Choked out a sob as Angela kept talking, more to herself than anyone.

“I should have known. You… you’ve been in poor conditions for days. You’re likely very malnourished. You aren’t a healthy weight and I should have known the. There’s nothing for your body to use to work against it. I should have thought of that, Jesse, I’m sorry.” 

She clung to his hand, now actively squeezing it in her own. He wished he could draw it back and tuck it against his body like the animal part of him begged him to, but he couldn’t move it at all. The fingers didn’t hurt, he was almost sure, but they didn’t respond when he tried to make them go. The muscles in his arms felt like they’d been soaked in hot oil and wrung out, tenderized and chewed before they were put back inside at all the wrong angles. 

From his peripheries, he watched Angela try and shine the light where she’d injected him. It eased the burn, but only by a fraction. Part of him wanted to reach out and strangle her, just to ensure she could never hurt him again, accident or not. A thankfully greater part wanted to reach out and let her comfort him, to have someone to ride out the agony with. It eased a little, as she set down a cylindrical container on the table, opening up like a flower and pouring out the same gold-yellow glow as the light had. Blessedly, agonizingly slowly, the pain started to ebb. 

Angela kept babbling to herself, now in a language he couldn’t understand and didn’t have the energy to try and place. She said he was the first person to have talked to her, really talked to her, in a long time. She didn’t have any friends. 

“I’m not mad,” he choked, and she looked up.

“You… what?”

The burning had started to fade to a dull ache in his bones, like he had some kind of monster flu.

“It’s okay. You didn’t. You didn’t mean to.”

“Of course I didn’t! I made a stupid mistake and caused you undue pain, and I. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know,” he wheezed, and forced his hand to very weakly squeeze hers. With the flowering-canister-thing, he felt better. Physically, that is. He was still trying to force back the rampant terror seething through his veins and threatening to black out his vision. 

“Is it going away?”

“Yeah.” And it was true. Most of him just felt distantly sore and overwhelmingly overexerted. “I am kind of, uh. Kind of having a panic attack, though.”

“What… do I do?”

“Can you just. Sit here?” he asked, trying not to sound too much like he was begging her to. “It. I just need to. Only a few minutes, usually.”

“Oh. Alright.” She kept her hold on his hand as he choked through a mouthful of tears. He’d met her, what, a half hour ago? And here he was, clinging to her hand like a toddler while he cried into his arm. 

He was safe here. He had to be. Being scared like this wasn’t going to help at all. He couldn’t function, and what good was that? It wasn’t. It would be safer to be less afraid. As he worked to rationalize apart the balled-up knot of anxiety in his skull, the jackhammering of his heart started to slow. Eventually, he shakily lifted his head and wiped away at his face with his free arm. It didn’t burn like his other arm had, but it did feel a little tingly. 

“You have really long eyelashes,” Angela pointed out.

He stared at her for a long moment, trying to process what she said. Her eyes were tight around the edges, and her chin was dimpled in a way that made her look near tears, herself. 

“I. Wh...what?” he coughed, and without meaning to, found his face splitting into a grin halfway through. He had just been sobbing through an episode, wishing for death through some of the nastiest pain in his life, and she noticed his eyelashes. 

“Your eyelashes,” she said again, and her face opened up into a hesitant smile, too. “They. You look like a cartoon princess.”

Jesse spat out a laugh at that, bending in half and giggling at her, seizing a little when he hiccuped through the last little bits of tears involuntarily. Angela snickered with him.

“A cartoon--I look like? Should I be offended?”

“No!” she snorted. “No they’re pretty! You have beautiful eyelashes!”

He broke down, then, feeling the laughter melt away the remaining anxiety and replace it with something warmer. Angela’s grip on his hand fell away as she wrapped her arms around her middle, gasping. Her nose crunched up at the middle again as she laughed.

“I,” she wheezed. “I changed my mind. You won’t take my compliments, get out.”

“You’re gonna stab me, drug me, and kick me out?”

She looked up at him, eyes wide and a little mortified, and he worried he’d crossed a line.

“Jesse! I gave you a panic attack! You--you shouldn’t joke! That’s,” she sputtered out another laugh, seemingly against her own will. “That’s horrible!”

“We all gotta cope somehow!”

“Mein Gott!”

Both she and Jesse were doubled over and heaving through laughter, more than a little hysterically. They were teenagers. The whole world still felt miles above their heads and they had barely any idea how to swim. They were allowed to be a little fucked up, in his opinion. The tear tracks on his face were starting to dry tacky, and he still couldn’t move his left arm very well, but it could have been worse. He made a friend, at least. Odd as she was, he liked Angela. And judging by the giggling forehead bumped into the side of his own, Angela liked Jesse, too.

\-------

Back in his own office, Gabriel distantly wondered if Mccree and Mercy were getting along.


	11. 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> update schedule _who?_
> 
> winks with both eyes heres some more gabe, whomst i love  
> also: jesse is very tired
> 
>  
> 
> this one is a little short my bad !!! the next one is longer tho and!!!!! THERES A DOG !!!!!!

As promised, when Mercy commed him back up to the bed bay, to the med bay he went. It hadn’t taken very long at all, and he had to wrap up his report before he could get going. Worried that the speediness of the appointment was due to she and Mccree not getting along. 

His worries were proved unfounded, apparently, as he rounded the corner to Mercy’s lab. He could hear the two teens laughing before he even reached the door.

“Oh, Gabriel!” Mercy looked up at him as he entered. “I didn’t expect you.”

“You called me up here, Mercy.”

Her face twisted uncomfortably as she shot a glance at Mccree, then back to Gabriel.

“I… had a brief concern, earlier.” It was Mccree who cringed, this time. “I’d actually forgotten. I was about to start Jesse’s eye exam, actually. But that’s all else I need to do.”

Gabriel shrugged. Probably wouldn’t take long. 

“Go ahead. I’ve got time.” He didn’t, really, and should be doing paperwork instead. Was he going to? Doubtful. What did he mean by doubtful? He wasn’t going to do all that paperwork. Mercy flapped a hand at him.

“Well, make yourself useful, then. Please go turn on the projector.”

He did as he was told, carefully stepping over papers across the room until he reached the little white light box and flipped the switch. All it did was provide background illumination to the blocky black letters on the plastic. Old, but functional.

“Alright Jesse, read the first line?”

“A-s-d-f-b-t.”

“The second?”

“L-j-u-n-t-y-o.”

“Third?”

And so on. Gabriel blocked it out until Mccree reached the bottom and Mercy entered it into her holopad. This time, he watched her cover one of Mccree’s eyes.

“Again?”

And he did it again. Gabriel was, admittedly, kind of impressed. Wasn’t much of a surprise--he already knew the kid was a good shot-- but still. Mercy covered his other eye, and he shifted uncomfortably. Not enough that she would notice, but enough for Gabriel. He tensed a little, mostly in his shoulders and his hands. Antsy.

“And one more time?”

“Uh. I can’t see those, Ang.”

Were his eyes different prescriptions? Could cause problems for his depth perception and pinpoint accuracy, probably. With the right kind of training or visual aids, definitely manageable, but it was one more thing to have to defend from Upstairs.

“You… can’t read any of the letters?”

“I can’t see any of the letters. I, uh. I can’t see anythin’, actually.”

Mercy set down the stick she’d used to cover his eyes and picked up a flashlight. Mccree visibly twitched when she grabbed his face, but didn’t pull away. She shined the light in one eye, then the other. 

“You’re aware you’re partially blind, Jesse?”

“Kinda hard not to, yeah.”

“Wait,” Gabriel piped up. He flicked the off switch on the projector. “As in. Completely blind?”

Mccree shrunk into himself, curling away from him.

“Yeah? I mean, there’s shapes, sometimes, but real blurry.”

Gabriel pressed a thumb to his cheek and gnawed on the inside of his mouth, thinking. Partial blindness like that would cause real problems for depth perception. Bad ones. He knew it firsthand, knowing Ana, of course. But when he’d fought with Deadlock, Mccree didn’t seem to have any problems judging his distances. He also hadn’t fought him hand-to-hand, though. If he talked to Ana, maybe she could give him some pointers? Or, maybe he could ask Mccree about doing the same thing she had, with getting a cybernetic. Definitely would need to talk about it, first. See how he does in training without one. 

“Sorry,” Mccree mumbled, and Gabriel startled back into the conversation.

“What? No, don’t worry about it. I was just thinking about a friend of mine who could help. Had something similar.”

Mercy, on the other hand, looked rather unamused. 

“Are there any other glaringly important conditions of yours I should know about?”

Mccree wiggled his left hand. “Few of my fingers don’t really work.”

Mercy took the hand immediately, gently flexing the digits.

“Bend these for me?”

All except for his pointer finger and thumb bent a little incompletely, moving too stiff.

“They always been like that?” Gabriel asked. Mccree flinched again. 

“Um. No. Got broken a while back, only one of ‘em ever healed right.”

“We could reset the bones,” Mercy suggested. The boy cringed.

“Please don’t break my hand, Angie.”

Gabriel snorted. “I think he’s fine, Mercy. You’re right-handed, right?”

“Yup.”

“That your shooting hand and your writing hand?”

“Yessir.”

“Then there’s no problem.”

Mercy frowned. “But it would be an easy procedure. With biotics, the hand would heal in just a couple weeks.”

“He said he’s fine and I believe him,” Gabriel said.

“...Alright.” She turned to Mccree. “If you ever change your mind, Jesse--”

“I think I’ll be just dandy without it, sweetheart.”

“Well, if that’s the case. I’ve finished with you, for now.” 

Sounded a little ominous, in Gabriel’s opinion, but Mccree didn’t seem to mind. He stood by the door while the two said their goodbyes, trying to wait politely for Mccree to come to him. He really, really didn’t want this kid to be scared of him. Any more scared than he already was, at least. Gabriel kicked himself, a little bit, for all of the little slip ups he’d made since walking into interrogation.

When Mccree appeared at his side, Gabriel left the med bay and started walking back the way he’d come. 

“Ezra’s still talking with Landi about reassigning rooms, and I need to do useless paperwork, so you're stuck in my office for a while, until he’s done.”

“Alright,” Mccree said, quietly.

He returned to his own office and pushed open the door, met with the familiar smell of his own space. The window was open, billowing in fresh sea air past the unlit candles on his bookshelf, making the place salty and a little spicy, just the way he liked it. The walls were an ugly shade of grey and the paint was peeling, but it smelled right, and that’s what mattered to Gabriel. Ana hated it in here, could never get over the spots on the carpet and flecks on the wall. Everything was visual, for her. After all the shit SEP had pumped into them all, she’d gotten ridiculously particular about the appearance of things, Jack had gotten particular about textures, and Gabriel had gotten picky about smells. Reinhardt and Torbjorn were less so, but still picky about their own things. All put together, the five of them almost made one functional dog. 

He waved a hand at the sofa pressed into the wall of the room.

“Go ahead and sit down, kid. There’s some books on the shelves around, feel free to look through whatever.” And he sat down behind his desk and got to typing. Tap-tap-tap, all of it was bullshit. Spat back phrases and information half-sewn into something mildly cohesive. In complete honesty, he took the opportunity to let his thoughts wander, more than anything. 

Mccree idled in the center of the room for a moment before very slowly slinking to one of the bookshelves, analytically looking over everything without touching any of it. He was a weird kid, like Mercy. The kind of weird that came from thinking too much. Gabriel was a lot the same way, at their ages. Jack was still like that.  
Mercy was book smart, brilliant in her application of the medical process and knowledge of the human body, so much so it almost made him uneasy. Mccree, though, he was smarter than anyone was giving him credit for. Jack thought he was a waste of recruitment, too skittish to be any good. He was clever enough to stay out of trouble but did it to a fault, and it was going to get himself and others killed. Or so Jack said.

He’d told Ana about the kid, and she was pitying Gabriel for it, a little. Under the impression that Mccree was a ditz, what with the cowboy schtick and the perpetual anxiety. She said he was just a child, Gabriel, and he was scared. Of course he took the job. It was the only way out he had. Doesn’t mean he’s fit for our kind of life. Not at all. I know you have a bleeding heart, Gabi, but you can’t save all of them. She was convinced he wouldn’t last, and told him, as gently as Ana Amari could, not to get his hopes too high.

But Gabriel knew. Mccree was a fucking genius. 

Even setting aside the split-second code switching, he was brilliant. Everything he did implied him to be less than he was, underwhelming and easy to underestimate. He wore both overconfidence and a lack thereof like a second skin, leaving him difficult to forget but more than easy enough to ignore. The cowboy look turned heads, sure, but that was it. He was noticed, acknowledged, and moved past, all in the span of a second. He did the same thing as Mercy when she had something ugly on her hands; she would look at it like a particularly difficult math problem, analyzing everything she knew to be true and everything she didn’t, lining it all up with comparisons to other things, crunching and processing information slower than a computer, but a dozen times as clever. Only, Mercy couldn’t do it with people. She could do it with bodies, but not with the person inside them. That’s where Mccree was different. 

Gabriel had enough evidence now to line up the situations, look more critically at how Mccree looked critically. When he’d met Jack for the first time, there was a split-second of hesitation while he looked at Jack and took in everything; the way he sat and steepled his fingers and held himself. It was when he opened his mouth that Jack lost. Mccree flipped into the overconfident persona, and he was talking to a brick wall.

He’d done the same to Kvonch, giving her a split second analysis before he reacted. Knew instantly that the best way to get in her good graces was to take on the same confidence, and did it without a hitch. It would have fooled her, too, if Kvonch wasn’t Blackwatch.

Gabriel was a minor outlier. Mccree’d behaved exactly the same to him as he had to Jack, up until the moment he recognized Gabriel, and the persona broke. He displayed his fear openly, and let negative emotions rear their heads with absolute clarity. Only. That was a shield, too. He didn’t figure it until Mccree met Mercy, and she analyzed him in plain sight. It was obvious what she was doing, it was the exact same thing that Mccree did every time he met someone, just less subtle. So, he did it back. Investigated openly. Switched out of both overcoats and into the real deal.

He did it to Torbjorn on the plane, when he thought Gabriel wasn’t looking. Turned into a real, three-dimensional teenager behind all the over-exaggeration and hyperbolizing of himself.

It was like he said: Mccree was fucking brilliant. 

The kid in question tucked himself very hesitantly into the sofa, a green book in his hand. Gabriel didn’t get a chance to see the title before he opened it, and immediately started to relax. He fidgeted his boots against one another where they rested on the floor.

“Take your shoes off and you can put your feet on the couch.”

Mccree jumped upon being addressed, snapping the book shut and half-standing like he expected to be yelled at. He probably was, Gabriel realized, and a part of his insides twisted.

“Oh, uh. Okay.”

He settled back down and went to shuffle out of the boots, too big for him by at least an entire shoe size. He hesitantly curled up nearly into a ball on the couch, book perched on his lap. 

And that’s where they both stayed, for an hour at least. Gabriel periodically checked his comm to see if Ezra was done, yet, but found nothing. In the corner of his eye, he saw Mccree’s head drooping forward, tucked up against the arm of the couch. Once, he slumped so far forward he bumped his head on the book before he caught himself, startling back into brief wakefulness.

Gabriel snagged a protein bar out of his desk and noticed Mccree watching him, likely alerted by the unfamiliar sound. The last time he’d eaten had been the shitty in-flight snacks that Rosie had, he realized, and kicked himself for not thinking of it earlier. He was probably starving. Dipshit. How could he have forgotten something like that? No wonder the kid didn't like him. 

“You want one?”

“...Sure?”

“Alright.” he grabbed another bar from his desk. “Catch.”

The bar went fast, as well as the one that followed it. He offered a third, but it was refused. Only about a half hour later, and Mccree was back to fighting a doze. Gabriel never tried to wake him up. Just shifting in his chair or breathing a little louder than usual would make the kid snap back upright. 

After a while, he did fall asleep. For real, even. Stopped jumping when Gabriel moved. Eventually curled all the way up, book hugged against his chest. 

Gabriel kept working. He couldn’t get up now, it would wake Mccree. So, for once, he did his paperwork. Most of it, anyway. He did spend awhile chatting in the client with Ana and Athena, once Ana had to dispatch. Ana, as always, laughed at him, but in a supportive kind of way. Athena liked to listen, suggest solutions for things. Gabriel didn't talk to her enough. Like Mccree, she was more clever than people gave her credit for.

It was peaceful, all up until someone knocked on his door. Mccree very nearly fell off the couch as Gabriel told whoever it was to come in. Whoever turned out to be Ezra and Landi, the latter of which sporting purple dark circles that made him look like he had two black eyes.

“You look like shit, Landi,” he remarked, and Landi stared dully at him.

“Thanks, I know.”

“You said Lowman’s been too loud?”

Landi wiped a hand down his face. “Listen. I love him as much as the next guy, but a guy can only take so much. He _screams_ , man. I keep waking up thinking it’s my family all over again.”

Oh. Gabriel swallowed the teasing remark he’d planned on, and instead creakily stood up, gently squeezing Landi’s shoulder. 

“I’ll help you move the rest of your stuff,” he offered, taking the cardboard box held in Landi’s hands. He didn’t protest. “Ezra, you ready to tour Mccree?”

“Of course, Gabriel.”

He softly shoved Landi out of the doorway, jerking his head toward Ezra, but addressing Mccree.

“Follow him,” he instructed, and Mccree glued himself into Ezra’s orbit in an instant. 

“Alright, Landi. Let me carry the heavy shit. You need a fuckin’ nap.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @ EVERYONE WHO COMMENTS: EVEN IF I DONT RESPOND TO EVERYONE PLS KNO THT I LOV U AND YR COMMENTS R GIVING ME L I F E
> 
> also!! as always if theres anything i can do to improve pls let me kno!!!! im. new to writing like this n i more than appreciate all the positive feedback !!!!!!


	12. 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THAT TOOK AWHILE MY BAD
> 
> HERES DOG, AS PROMISED,

Ezra was great at his job. At least, Jesse thought he was. Seemed like it. A kind of natural leader he’d never really seen before, like he’d gotten to where he was not by fighting his way up the ranks, but floating there. Humble, quiet, smart. Infinitely patient, it looked like. He was a lieutenant, he explained, after Jesse had given him one too many odd looks. Eloquently described the command chain as they walked. Each watchpoint had a Blackwatch lieutenant to whom all Blackwatch agents reported to, and all lieutenants reported to Reyes. Reyes, who was unsurprisingly the head of Blackwatch in its entirety. 

Jesse couldn’t remember much of the specifics when it came to Ezra’s tour of the base, far too overwhelmed with information. But he did come away with the knowledge that Gibraltar was massive. Two floors: the lower, larger floor belonged solely to Blackwatch, and the upper to Overwatch, but in a way that implied it really belonged to Blackwatch and they just let Overwatch set foot there. The training rooms could be counted as a third floor, he supposed; most of them were down a flight of stairs to accommodate the huge, reaching ceilings. He was supposed to report to training room 1C tomorrow at 0800 to meet his trainer. 

He was getting a personal trainer. Ezra said the same thing that Reyes had, that training was basically a runthrough of military boot camp so he could hold his own against the fleet of recruits coming in to try for Blackwatch in a few weeks. It made sense, much as he hated to admit he needed work. He was more than a little unsettled by the idea, and it would have made him think twice about joining up. Think twice for the billionth time, but whatever.

Only, there was one other thing.

He got his own _room_.

Ezra had walked him down to the living quarters and mildly announced the door in front of them was his, as if it weren’t something unbelievable to Jesse’s ears. Pressed his hand to the interactive panel beside the door, now hung with a neatly-lasered in plaque that red ‘27 - MCCREE.’

Inside looked like its own small apartment, save for a kitchen. A soft-looking bed, a real bed, with its headboard pressed into the center of the right wall, leaving room to idle around it. A nightstand was on either side, with a bookcase tucked completely into the far right corner. The middle of the left wall was interrupted by a doorway to a bathroom (it had its own bathroom, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit), a worn wooden dresser pushed against the half of the wall closest to the door, and the far left corner had a desk. Directly across from him was a wide, open window, curtains gently sighing along the wind from the sea. 

It was the nicest place he’d been since leaving home.

“This… is mine? Like, _mine_ , mine?”

Ezra chuckled, but not in a way that felt condescending. He was really, really good at not being condescending, which was something Jesse appreciated. 

“ _Yours_ , yours.”

He sounded like music when he talked, soft and hard to hear unless you paid attention, but in a way that made him entirely impossible to ignore. Made sense, now, why Reyes picked him to give orders.

Jesse stumbled inside, running his fingers over the weathered woodwork and ducking his head into the bathroom. In it was a mirror, sink and cabinet, toilet, and a shower. He tripped his way back out, dragging his hands over any surface in reach, assuring himself it was real.

“Anything you find in here is yours, too,” Ezra said, and Jesse looked up. “Landi took everything he wanted, so if anything’s left behind, it’s yours. There should be a coloring book in the nightstand--” Jesse was digging through the drawers before he could finish. Lo and behold, a weathered, shiny coloring book was sitting in one of the nightstands, right beside a beaten pack of crayons. 

“It’s a bit of a… Blackwatch tradition,” Ezra explained, still standing politely in the doorway. Were Jesse a more trusting person, he probably would have let him in. “You’re welcome to take your favorites, of course, but more often than not, the books get left behind when people switch rooms. Most everyone has one. Something to leave behind, I suppose.”

Blackwatch gave its top-secret, weird, black-ops mystery death agents coloring books. The enigma never ceases to grow, or so it seemed to Jesse.

“Huh,” he mused, eloquently. 

Ezra lightly chuckled again, this time gesturing to a set of cardboard boxes sitting beside the dresser.

“These are clothing kits. A set of standard issue clothes, one in large, medium, and small. If you need other sizes, just let me know. Take whichever you need, or all of them if you want. Just leave any you don’t want outside the door.” He gently set a hand on the doorway, moving to turn around. “I’m just to the left, if you need me. If you’d like help with anything, or there’s anything you want to know, don’t hesitate to ask. 

“For now, though, I’d recommend getting some rest. You have an early day tomorrow and jetlag is a merciless curse.” 

Jesse stopped poking at the boxes and looked up. 

“Er. Wait.” His voice came out reedy and strained, words awkward and unsure as they tumbled from his face. “Ez… Ezra.”

He turned in the doorway upon being addressed.

“Hmm?”

“I. Thanks. Thank-you, I mean. A lot.”

Ezra’ face reached into a warm smile, eyes crinkling at the edges into worn-in creases that said he smiled often.

“Of course, Mccree. Welcome to Gibraltar.”

And he was gone. The sliding door shut automatically behind him, leaving Jesse in the watery sunlight barely filtering in the room from where it set on the building’s opposite side. He considered turning on the lightswitch by the door, but decided he preferred the natural light, blue-grey off the ocean and leaving a square of daylight sliding over the wall.

He sat down crosslegged in front of the boxes and, after needlessly glancing over his shoulder, drew Kvonch’s knife from where it rested against his back and cut through the packing tape over the leftmost box. He held up the first thing he got his hands on: a long-sleeved shirt that fell open as he picked it up, just barely too small in the way that it would have probably been considered ‘flattering.’ A little ‘S’ was printed on the tag on the neck. All small, then. Not really usable for him. He sloppily folded the shirt back up and set it on top of the others before digging into the next box. The clothes in this one were larger, enough to be a little baggy, but wearable. Definitely not quite big enough for him to properly fill out, yet, but perfect, in his opinion. He was definitely keeping this one.

Dug through it, and laid out all of his options. It contained two long-sleeved shirts, two short-sleeved shirts, two tank tops, a pair of shorts, a pair of pants, and what looked like four pairs of underwear, with sports bras to match. All of the clothes were some kind of monochrome. 

The large box yielded the same, but predictably, in a larger size. He wouldn’t be able to wear them very comfortably, as is, but they were usable, so he decided to keep those, too, on the off chance he’d grow at all. Sorted them out by type; shirts, pants, and underwear, and messily shoved them into their own drawers. The small box he carried to the door and, with a press of his hand to the console, the door was opened and the box was set outside. Like Ezra had told him to, or so he hoped.  
To soothe his anxious mind, he found the option to lock the door and tapped it. 

Then he really got a look at the room. Dug through all of the drawers, thoroughly investigated the closet, and poked around the bathroom cabinet, which yielded a packaged toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, an array of menstrual products he steadfastly ignored, a razor, and extra rolls of toilet paper. Further sleuthing found him a medical kit wedged between the vanity and toilet, in which there were the same various supplies as had been in the one given to him on the plane.  
A bag of floss sticks had come with the toothbrush. He did use them, flossed and brushed his teeth, scrubbed his face in the sink and ran wet hands through his hair. 

After double, triple, and quadruple checking the door was locked, he put on clean clothes and piled into the bed, tucking the knife in his hand beneath the pillow. 

It was so soft. Holy shit. Like sleeping on a cloud. In retrospect, the mattress wasn’t great, not by any means, but to Jesse, it was heavenly. He clumsily set himself an alarm on the red-lit digital clock, and fell asleep almost instantly. 

Sometime in the night, he swore he heard someone crying, but refused to focus on it. Just as likely he was dreaming, and looking any closer would turn the dream into something worse. 

He woke up exactly one minute before his alarm, and managed to turn it off before it started beeping at him. Got up, repeated his routine from the night before-- floss, brush, face, hair-- nervously scooped himself into one of the too-big t-shirts and a too-big pair of shorts, and stumbled down to the training room Ezra had showed him the day before, twice as antsy now not having his knife or the feeling of safety his uniform provided him. 

The room was empty, as it was yesterday, aside from some mats along the floors and walls, punching bags on their own stands, and beaten targets on the back wall.

Empty, all aside from what he assumed to be a woman, standing alone in the center of the room. He could see from here her hair was cut short into a bob, and she wore dark athletic clothes printed with the Blackwatch logo. Jesse couldn’t guess if she was field or not. Knew there were agents who went into the field and those that didn’t, but wasn’t really sure what the ‘didn’t’s did. 

Very hesitantly, he crept into the room, cursing the click of his spurs that gave him away.

The woman looked a little surprised to see him.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re early.”

“I can wait outside.”

“No. That’s fine. We can get started now, if you like.”

He swallowed. “Okay.”

The woman extended a hand, lightly scarred, all of them looking like they came from using sharp things. No ridges over the knuckles from fighting hand-to hand. 

“Sokol.”

Jesse awkwardly offered his in return. “Mccree.”

“Alright. Have you ever had combat training before?”

“No ma’am.”

“We’ll start simple. Show me what you can do.” She waved her finger in a circle. “Run for endurance, first. As long as you can, but stop when you need to.”

“You mean. Just run laps?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. You can definitely stop for a drink, if you’d like.”

And so Jesse ran. Ran until Sokol told him to stop, actually, when it started to feel like he would black out. She made him sit down and stretch, afterwards, until he didn’t look sick. Forced a water bottle into his hands and made him drink the whole thing before he could do anything else. 

Next she made him sprint, and he did. Not for long, until she told him to stop again. He wasn’t a great sprinter, by any means. Could haul ass if he needed to, but was definitely better at endurance. Sokol looked upset, and it made him more than a little anxious. Meant he’d probably done something wrong, or that he wasn’t anywhere near the standard. 

“Yes’m?”

“Show me your hands.”

He stuck his hands out in front of him and quietly sweat bullets as she looked at them, but didn’t make any move to touch him. She frowned.

“Have you eaten breakfast today?”

Had he. Eaten breakfast? 

“...No?”

Sokol’s face twisted in displeasure. Furrowed her brow and pursed thin lips even thinner. Jesse was met with a rising desire to start running in the opposite direction.

“Before our next session tomorrow,” she began. “You need to eat something. If it’s too early for you to get to the mess for some reason, I can move the meeting time a little later. But you have to eat, Mccree. Low blood sugar is not your friend.”

“Eight is fine,” he assured her, a little too fast. “You don’t have to move the time.”

She was concerned about his blood sugar. Why the fuck did she care about his blood sugar? Why would anyone? The easy answer was that they were concerned for his wellbeing, but his mind actively refused to accept the thought as a possibility. Her telling him to eat did mean he was expected to use the mess hall or kitchen, though. Ezra had told him they were available, but. He wasn’t sure that meant he could take anything. Decided to err to the side of caution, up until then.  
“I think for the rest of our time, today, it would be best to stick to stretches,” Sokol said, so that’s what he did. She made him drink another water bottle. 

She dismissed him, after a while, and so he went back to his room. Didn’t know where else to be. He was hungry, but couldn’t really decide whether or not to brave the mess. Instead, he waited until the standard lunch time and slunk into the kitchen, while most everyone else was in the mess hall. He spent the rest of his day in his room, staring out the window or coloring. Went to bed early, and set his alarm an hour earlier than it had been that morning. 

It became a routine. He woke up, stole into the kitchen, ate breakfast, and went to Sokol. The first few days she had him run, stretch, and beat on a punching bag. It was around the third time that she started to teach him different combat forms. Never touched him, but showed by doing it herself, and verbally correcting him when he tried to mirror it. He at once appreciated it and hated it. Appreciated that she wanted to give him his space, hated the way it made him feel like he was something rancid and distasteful. He wasn’t upset, though, not with her.

Sokol was a nice woman. And she was a woman, she assured him, after Jesse had nervously asked if he’d made any mistake. She liked Hawaiian rolls and peaches, often brought them in the morning and nibbled on them while Jesse did his warmups. She offered him extra peaches, sometimes, and they’d sit in silence on the mats and eat when they were done for the day. She was a quiet person. Jesse didn’t mind it, made him feel like there was one less way for him to screw up, but he admitted to being a little socially starved. Wanted to visit Angela, but didn’t know if it was allowed. He tentatively tried talking to Sokol, a few times. She was a little awkward, and it was obvious she had no idea how to interact with Jesse. It was a bit of a relief, knowing she had just as much of an idea how to talk to him as he did to her. 

“Isn’t this,” he wheezed, one day, between punches. “Kind of pointless?”

Sokol tilted her head at him, but didn’t look angry. It was something he learned, that Sokol wasn’t particularly quick to anger. Liked to listen.

“How so?”

“I just mean, y’know.” Punch. “Isn’t Blackwatch all about being unpredictable?” Punch. “Seems like using military form is pretty easy to predict.”

Sokol hummed. “You’re definitely right, in that it’s easy to predict.” Punch. “You’re really doing the normal training process backwards.” Jesse stopped hitting the bag and looked at her. “The recruits we’re working with get this kind of training, first, and learning to fight unpredictably comes afterwards. By the end, here, you should have an advantage, all things considered. You’ll know how they fight, and you can apply your own knowledge to it.”

He stared at Sokol for a few moments, heaving breaths. Nodded. 

“Okay.”

It was about day seven that Sokol asked him if he’d ever sparred, and he felt his blood stop moving in his veins.

“You mean, like. Fighting. To train?”

“I do.”

“No. I’ve never done that.”

And he didn’t much want to. He didn’t want people in his space. Wanted them far away, shooting distance. 

“I mean. I know how to fight, isn’t that enough?”

“No,” Sokol said, very simply. “You learn how to move fluidly, and you get used to the concept of hand-to-hand. That way, if you need it in the field, you’re not caught off guard.”

Jesse did not want to spar. He didn’t want to let people get that close, because getting that close made it that much easier for them to kill him, which was absolutely less than ideal. 

Sokol seemed to notice, because she just had him run, instead.

The next day she brought a dog. Some kind of mutt he couldn’t place, in its own dog armor. The dog armor was, by far, one of the best things he’d seen in his life. Why she brought a dog, though, was beyond him. He didn’t really feel like complaining, especially when he got his warm-up instructions.

Sokol told him to say hello, and he did. The dog’s name was Pepper, and she was specifically trained to train others. How? He didn’t know. Didn’t care, too occupied with dog. Jesse scratched behind her ears while she sat, very primly in front of him, sniffing his hands, and once, licking his face. He spent at least half an hour just petting her. 

It was more than stress-reducing. He felt like a person for the first time in awhile, face buried into the furry neck of a nice dog. He almost cried. Very privately, he did, a little, while he hid his face in Pepper’s fur. She stuck her nose in his ear. Eventually, his curiosity got the best of him.

“Not that I’m complainin’,” Jesse said, where he sat on the floor, arms full of dog. “But why’s she here?

“Pepper’s trained for getting people comfortable with close-quarters combat.”

Jesse frowned. “How?”

Sokol motioned for him to stand up, and, reluctantly, he did. 

“She’s going to tap you with her nose, and you’re going to tap her back.”

He took a step back. “I’m not gonna have to hit her, am I? Cause I’m not gonna.”

Sokol waved her hands in front of her, placating. 

“Oh, no. Gods, no. You’re just going to give her a little tap. Like this,” she said, and very lightly touched three of her fingers to Pepper’s head. Pepper tried to lick them. 

Jesse wrung out his hands. Okay. He could do that. 

“You’re ready?”

“‘Ready’ is a shit way of putting it, and I’m not, but. Yeah. I’m ready.”

Sokol gave him a moment, waited until he stopped twitching before she snapped her fingers, and Pepper looked at her. She pointed at Jesse.

“Pepper, bup.”

And Pepper mildly plodded up to him and proceeded to shove her nose in his stomach. He leapt back, and swatted her a little harder than he’d intended. Immediately, he dropped to his knees and frantically pet the dog, apologizing over and over. Pepper tried to poke his hands with her nose. 

Sokol didn’t tell him to get up, so he sat there, for a few minutes, hugging the dog again. What a fucking mess he was. A dog was the first physical contact he’d had in a week, and it reminded his stupid brain how much he thrived on it. Found himself missing Angela, despite meeting her once, and miserably wondered if she missed him, too. Probably not. After a few minutes, Sokol sat down, crosslegged, and waited. Pepper happily meandered back and forth between them, reveling in the affection. 

When he finally convinced himself to get up again, Pepper sat down and tipped her head at him, then to Sokol. Sokol looked at Jesse, raised an eyebrow. He nodded at her, a little shakily, and she gave Pepper the command again.

This time, she nosed him in the leg, and he, very gently, put a hand on her head.

“Good,” Sokol said.

He did that for a while, and as he did, he found himself less and less nervous with the idea of the dog entering his space. Once, she jumped and put her paws on his shoulders, shoving her face into the side of his neck. It was the first bout of genuine laughter he’d had since meeting Angela, and to make things even better, this one wasn’t hysteria-induced. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sokol smiling.

She dismissed him at about their usual time and, very timidly, Jesse asked if he could stay with Pepper some more. To his surprise, Sokol stayed too, sat down near him the same as she had earlier. And there they stayed. Petting a dog in silence, until Sokol spoke.

“I’m sorry to make you train like this,” she said. Her voice was very even, definitely on the quieter side of the scale, thinly accented.

“Sorry I’m. Kind of a pain.”

She smoothed her hands over Pepper’s ears. 

“You’re not. I was… a lot the same, when I trained.”

“You ain’t gotta try and make me feel better. I. Appreciate it, but you don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything.” She pushed Pepper back in Jesse’s direction, and the dog contentedly flopped into his lap. As much as she could, anyway, considering she was too big by far to fit.

“I don’t have to work here. I don’t have to follow Reyes’ orders, if I don’t want. No one does. My choices are all my own.”

Jesse dug his fingers into the fur behind Pepper’s chin, and listened. It was the most he’d heard Sokol say all at once, and he didn’t want to interrupt.

“I am… not one for physical contact with other people. I’m not good at it. I disliked sparring, because of that. Being so… close to people. It’s required that all Blackwatch agents, field or not, know how to defend themselves, so I needed to be able to spar in order to pass the entrance exam.” 

She hummed under her breath, was silent for a few long moments. Tilted her head a little, and stared at her hands in her lap, debating on what to say. Jesse stayed still, feeling the thump of Pepper’s heartbeat where she lay on his thigh.  
“I understand that you’re uncomfortable. For me, what made sparring… easier, was to think of it. Like dancing. Hitting something is just a step. Being hit is a step. Makes it… less intimate, in a way. For me, at least.”

She pursed her lips together and furrowed her brow at her knees. 

“Hmm. I don’t know how to explain it. How I think of it, I mean. Whatever way helps you is good. What I really mean is that I understand where you’re coming from. I don’t know how you’re feeling, but I can sympathize with your situation, in some ways. If that makes sense.”

She looked up at him, then, head still tilted a little to the side.

“Does that make sense?”

“Kind of? I mean. No. I have no idea what you’re sayin’, but I get the idea behind it. The big picture.”

“That’s… good.”

“Yeah.” Jesse took a minute to stew on it. Knew Sokol didn’t much mind the silence, so he didn’t try to fill in the gaps. 

It did make sense, in a way. He understood the concept, of thinking of fighting as a dance. That part was easy. What he didn’t understand, though, was the concept of it as an… un-intimate thing. Dancing was usually something reserved for people who were close, and was thought of as positive. Way of showing trust, affection. But, he reasoned, it didn’t have to be. Remembered one year when he was younger, eight or nine, at a family friend’s wedding, and their daughter disliked him. She asked him to dance, and stomped on his feet the whole time. Not that it really hurt, considering they were eight year olds, but he idea was still there. Fighting, but in a more elegant way. If fighting was a dance, then it didn’t have to be intimate. Dances didn’t have to be. But. Dancing could be intimate. Did that mean, somehow, fighting could be, too? Could be a show of friendliness, from the right people, in the right scenario, couldn’t it? The idea was entirely absurd to Jesse, at first, and he balked at the fact he’d thought it at all. It was a young woman’s voice that urged him to reconsider. Took him a moment to place it. 

All his recent memories said otherwise, but he figured for sake of politeness to his sister, he should give the thought a try. Reached back into his head, looked for something to compare it to, a memory to line up the idea against. One of she and his mother rose to the surface, and he fought back his instinctual response to bury it back down. Ached. 

It was old, worn away by time, but not forgotten in the least. He was ten or eleven, sat out on the back porch in the last light of the day, past the time the sun set but not quite when the moon rose. His mother and his sister stood in the grass, and his sister punched his mother in the face. She tried to, anyway, but his mother caught her fist in her hand and jerked it sideways before she had a chance, sending her stumbling to the left, but unharmed. 

_Don’t aim for the face, mija. You’ll hurt your knuckles more than you hurt them._

And his sister swung again, this time for her stomach. His mother caught her, used the force to twist her around and press his sister’s arm against her back. Not enough to hurt her, just to pin her still and let go.

_Eyes open. You weren’t looking at my hands._

Another set of exchanged blows, another pin for his mother, another softly delivered piece of instruction. Adjusted forms, carefully directed hits, tips for where to hit and with what.

He sat on the stoop and watched, tracked the stars that began to speck the sky. His father came out and told him to go to bed. 

But I want to watch, he protested. His father offered to carry him upstairs, instead. 

_I’ll hold you like when you were a little baby. My little baby boy._ Pinched his cheeks and poked at his sides until Jesse chose to flee, petulantly insisting through giggles that he wasn’t a baby, up the stairs and to his room. He left his window open, and listened to his mother’s quiet voice, unintelligible from the second floor, as she softly guided his sister through combat for at least another hour.

They’d been fighting, but it hadn’t been negative. Fighting, sure, but not hurting for the sake of wanting to hurt. 

“Think I get what you’re saying,” he said, and it came out a lot thicker than he thought it would. Stuck to his throat.

“I hope it helps.”

“Me too.”

He and Sokol sat there for a long time. She didn’t say anything when he valiantly tried to blink away the tears in his eyes, or when he failed and hid his face in Pepper’s side instead. Pepper didn’t say anything, either. Snorted in his ear.

He could do this. He had to, had to do something, had to stop being so broken and afraid of everything. Figured it would be easier, learning with Sokol. She understood. Probably not understood, exactly, but she was trying to. Trying to help. It wasn’t much, but. It was more than nothing, and that, he could work with.


	13. 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY LADS HOPE YR READY FOR SOME, ANGST  
> fun fact: i cried writing this? i love being a fucken wreck and projecting
> 
> anyways heres more gab as Father and jesse as A Seventeen Year Old
> 
> sorry its kinda short, mostly dialogue,,
> 
>  
> 
> also a lil forewarning theres some self deprecating talk in here blease be kind 2 yrselves

Mccree’s eye caused problems. Gabriel knew it would, but he’d still hoped it wouldn’t, for the kid’s sake. Sokol had told him about it once they started sparring for real, that he couldn’t land a hit on her at all once she really started moving. Couldn’t block her, couldn’t counter her. She knew it was his depth perception from the start, described him as being just a second too early, a second too late, too fast, too slow, the right place, the wrong time. He just couldn’t stand in a fight, no matter how hard he tried. And to his credit, Mccree did try-- he tried like his life depended on it, which, upon greater reflection, Gabriel realized he might have been under the impression that it did. Sokol kept him updated on how hard he tried during training, Athena kept him updated on how often he went to the same training room and whaled on a punching bag for hours, Ezra kept him updated on the fact he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the damn kid since he got his room. Nobody had, for that matter. It’d been more than two weeks, and no one in Blackwatch had any idea who Mccree was. Gabriel got more agents coming to him asking if this mystery gangrunner was even _real_. Mccree had effectively made himself into a fucking cryptid.

Still, the problems with his depth perception meant he needed something. Gabriel had offered him the choice between an assistive visor, like Jack’s, or an artificial eye, like Ana’s. Mccree obviously knew about neither Jack, Ana, or the tech they used, so those specific examples went unmentioned. He’d picked out the visor, though, and he’d gotten fit with the optic sensor just a few days ago. A little red, glowing, crescent-shaped halo over his browbone from which the hard light lens would emit and sync to his visual cortex. 

Gabriel’d worried about the surgery, but it turned out alright, once he’d assured Mccree that Mercy could be the one to do it. She and Mccree got along well, which gave Gabriel no small peace of mind. It was good he was talking to somebody, at least, even if it was just Mercy. Maybe especially if it was Mercy, considering how similar they were. He’d reassured Mccree he was allowed to visit Mercy whenever he wanted, so long as she wasn’t working, and it seemed like he took advantage of that. Gabriel was just glad he was getting some kind of social interaction outside of Sokol. Wished he’d talk at least a little with some of the other agents, but didn’t push.

As for the eye, Sokol said his performance was already improving exponentially, and that she expected it to get better still. She insisted on sending updates daily; she had since the beginning, when she was fresh out of basic and spoke even less than she did now. Liked to write, though, as her reports had proved. Gabriel actually enjoyed reading them, had mentioned to her before that she might try writing something for herself, sometime. A novel or something. She had the talent for it.

About Mccree, she said he was a heavy hitter, good at guessing her moves and working against her in the same breath. Occasionally complained about the eyepiece giving him a headache, but usually only if he’d kept it on for too long. Most every one of her reports ended with ‘nice,’ ‘kind,’ ‘likes dogs,’ ‘good person,’ ‘dislikes hawaiian rolls’ or some other meager fact or compliment. 

It was good to see him improving. Gabriel only worried that it went… too smooth. Most new agents who were gangrunners, like Mccree, had issues in the first few weeks. Picked fights, got snappy with someone, found other gangrunners and started shit over previous allegiances. Mccree had done none of it. Even more odd, he seemed fairly alright. Alright in the sense that he hadn’t broken down, yet, as was common, but Gabriel didn’t find the fact particularly comforting. He holed himself away almost constantly, despite how taken he seemed to be with the air of Blackwatch. Devoted himself almost completely to training, maybe even moreso after getting the assist. Sokol mentioned worsening dark circles, suffering coordination, increasing anxiety. All the red light warning signs to a break, and Mccree had no one to go to if he needed it. 

“You seem stressed, Commander,” Athena mused.

He stopped gnawing on his cheek and looked up at nothing in particular.

“What could have given you that idea?”

“It is three AM and you are still in your office.”

“I’m not tired.”

“You fell asleep on your desk at approximately 20:43, and remained asleep for three hours.”

“And that’s why I’m not tired.”

Not because he actually got any rest, of course. He didn’t. He just had too many nightmares. Decided he didn’t want to try again, not in his empty room. Ana wasn’t on base, and neither was Jack. Torbjorn wasn’t, either. Reinhardt was with Ana, as always. There was no one he could ask to bunk with. 

Usually, if he got this bad, he might bother Soares with it, or, more accurately, Soares would somehow manage to find him and hang around until he started venting anyways. Soares was in the med bay, though. That didn’t ease his anxieties any. 

He didn’t talk to Athena about it. She had plenty to worry about, as is. Knew she worried, but also knew she managed a full plate already, and didn’t need the extra weight on her mind. Didn’t stop her from trying to help, though. 

“If I might suggest going to one of the training rooms?”

“I should do work, Athena.”

Below his fingertips, the hard light keyboard dissipated, along with the light of his monitors. He sighed.

“Oddly enough, it seems as if I’ve had a minor malfunction. It will take me at least a few hours to fix. You can read a book, perhaps.”

“Athena.”

“Commander.”

He groaned, running a hand through his hair, hat abandoned on his desk on top of a stack of papers. 

“Okay. You win. I’ll go to 4B for a while, if you’ll get the lights on, please.”

“Of course, Commander.”

And Gabriel left his office. Kept the lights on and door unlocked, in the event Ezra needed to get in, or someone wanted to sleep on the couch. It’d happened before. He’d come back to his office in the middle of the night, one night, after he’d recently gotten home from a longer field mission, and found almost every single one of the agents who’d attended with him all piled on or around the couch in the room, still too used to sleeping altogether to do it alone. He’d shoved a pair of blanket hogs out of the way and joined them. He’d been awake for the same reason, after all. 

The hallways were almost entirely quiet at this hour, aside from the miscellaneous mechanical noises of AC units or lights, and his own footsteps on the scuffed wood floors. Training rooms were at the very end of the dorms, and he walked more leisurely through the less populated back half of the hallways, stopping or slowing to glance at the periodic balconies between every few rooms. Most were covered in some array of plants or other comfort. He heard at least two people softly chatting between each other as he passed one, saw the light of a cigarette in the dark. Probably fresh from a mission in odd timezones, or up for the same reasons he was. He wasn’t the only one with sleepless nights.  
4B was the perfect room for nights like this, though. He picked it carefully, not at the end but not at the front of the lineup. He had no particular fondness or attachment to it, but no particular dislike for it either. But it still wasn’t the most average room, not smack in the middle with the most even attitude. Somewhere close, but not quite. Not a like, not a dislike, not a neutral. No one would look here, because there was no reason for Gabriel to pick it. Not quite as big as the A rooms, without the careful computer machinery to monitor and warp the environment, but still with shiny panels of glass in a ring around the ceiling to observe from. Sparring mats dotted the floors, some rolled up and pushed into a corner of the room. Punching bags hung on silvery hooks, metal chains attached to hard light disks that held them up. 

He decided to just hit on one of the bags until he felt tired enough. Wasn’t energetic or focused so much he wanted to deal with bots, not so inclined to mindless work like running or lifting. So he instead tried working up a good sweat thumping his fists into the bag, not caring enough to wrap up his knuckles, seeing as they’d heal before morning, anyway. Carefully blanked out his head, forced himself to think about nothing whatsoever. Quiet, save for his own breaths and the snap of skin against synthetic fiber. He’d stop every now and again to take a long pull from his water bottle, shake out his shoulders and stretch his legs before going back. The temperature stayed pleasant, almost definitely because Athena kept lowering it the harder he worked. Left him pleasantly cool enough to want to keep moving. 

The repetitive lull of the sounds and smells of the environment let him get lost. The bags stunk like not-quite-leather and sweat, the whole room tasted like dust and cement, the glass just barely caught the reflection of the lights on the ceiling. His fists made the air wheeze when he swung, pushed the breath in and out of his lungs, hit rhythmic on the bag. One-two, one-two, one-two, on--.

Gabriel stilled, one hand on the bag. Tipped his head sideways to try and pinpoint where the odd noise had come from. Not from him or the room. Reminiscent of, but not quite the sound of chains clinking against one another. Put his hand to the bag to quiet the creaking of the metal as it swung. He waited a few moments, heaving, before he let the bag go and hit again, one eye on the doorway, this time.

And there it was again, click. He didn’t stop, but he did land lighter, keeping his head inclined to the door. Click.

Rhythmic, like Gabriel’s knuckles had been on the bag. A brief space of silence between each one, reminiscent of a shoe hitting the ground. They were footsteps. 

As soon as he realized it, he saw Mccree, or all people, carefully peer into the room, just barely caught a glimpse of his face before he was gone, paled and ducked away upon seeing Gabriel staring back at him.

“Mccree?”

The kid crept back into view, just barely within the training room’s massive, open doorway. Gabriel frowned, glanced up at the bright red LED display on one of the walls, currently informing him that the time was 03:56.

“The hell are you doing down here? Why’re you up so late?”

Mccree shifted on his feet, uneasy, stiff.

“Why’re you?”

On his guard and on edge. 

“Couldn’t sleep. You?”

“Yeah.”

Gabriel stood back from the bag.

“What’s keeping you awake, kid?”

“What’s keeping you?” he sniped back. Upon closer inspection, Gabriel noticed the disheveled mop of his hair, the stiffness in his shoulders, the twitch of his hands. He was terrified of something, and Gabriel decided to be honest. 

“Nightmares.”

Mccree deflated, just a little. Nodded.

“Yeah.”

Gabriel stepped back from the bag and took another swig from his water bottle, waving Mccree over. The kid carefully came to stand at the bag beside him, and Gabriel tossed him the roll of boxing tape.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Do you?”

Not talking unless Gabriel did, first. He glanced sideways at Mccree, taking in his haggard appearance. Now that he was closer, it was painfully obvious he was a wreck. His hands shook, his face was ashy, he was already sweating despite not having done anything. The skin around the implant stood out bright pink against his face with how colorless it was. Looked like he might have been crying, or was close to it.

“Omnic Crisis stuff,” Gabriel said, quiet, but not nonchalant. Couldn’t be if he tried. “Lots of close calls, back then. Get a lot of nightmares that they, uh. Weren’t so close. Usually, when it happens, I go talk to someone else who gets it. Everyone’s off base, though.”

Mccree nodded shakily, pulled a wavering breath in through his nose. 

“Yours?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know, actually. Can never remember ‘em. Just wake up feeling…” He swallowed. “Bad.”

“They always bother you like this?”

“I used to get ‘em every now and again, as a kid, but. Angie gave me this regulator-thing to help me get sleep better, or something, and now it’s been pretty much everytime I close my eyes.”

“You told her about it?”

“Nah. She said at first odd dreams are normal, y’know? They’ll balance out eventually. I’ll be alright.”

“You don’t look alright,” Gabriel pointed out, watching Mccree fumble the tap in his hands for the third time, at least. The shaking in his hands got worse, and he still tried again. “Here, let me. You’re killing me, kid.”

He reached out and loosely took one of Mccree’s palms, holding the fabric wrapping in one hand and winding it over his knuckles, a little clumsy from a mix of sleep deprivation and being unused to doing hands other than his own. He didn’t notice Mccree was crying until he started sniffling. Felt his gut hit the floor. Fuck, was that his fault? 

“Sorry,” Mccree choked.

“Shit, kid,” Gabriel tossed what remained of the tape into one of the baskets between bags and dropped Mccree’s half-wrapped hands, watched him wince away and hold them himself. Gabriel couldn’t figure out if he wanted contact or not, so he kept his distance. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“No, I’m. I’m being a crybaby. Sorry.” Clumsily scrubbed at his eyes. “I’ll get over it.”

“You shouldn’t. Give yourself a break, you’re doing great out here. Having _feelings_ isn’t gonna change that.”

“I’m not doing great, though! I’m not good in training. I’m not good at running, or sparring, or anything. I had to have a _dog_ teach me how to be in a fistfight. I-I’m useless to you. To Blackwatch. I’m a waste of your time, don’t you get that? I’m just a stupid, lost-cause fucking teenager, and I don’t deserve this! I’ve never done anything for you, and all I’ll wind up being good for is getting killed! But you’re still putting time and money into me, like I’m worth anything, and I’m not! I-I don’t--” Mccree choked off, wrapping his arms around his middle and hiccuping.

Gabriel felt his heart crumple in his chest. Like something fragile and chalky, the powder his little sisters would put on their hands before gymnastics. Crumbling. 

“Fuck. Kid-- Mccree, that’s not true. Shit, come here.” He opened his arms and almost immediately, Mccree slumped into him, mumbling half-formed apologies. Gabriel rubbed circles into his back and felt Mccree’s arms come up to dig into the back of his shirt. 

He was right. Knew this would happen, still hoped it wouldn’t, didn’t try hard enough to stop it before the poor kid got this bad. It was his fault Mccree felt like he wasn’t good enough; Gabriel’d never told him otherwise, even though he should have. Mccree was just a teenager, how could he have forgotten that? Fuck. 

“You’re doing fucking incredible, okay? Sokol won’t shut up about you. Ezra keeps asking if I’ve heard from you. Mercy loves it when you visit. You’re her best friend, you know that? Nobody’s talked to her before, not like you do. You give a shit. You met Athena less than a week ago, and she adores you. You’re smart-- brilliant, okay? I’ve seen that. Anyone who’s told you differently is a dipshit. I’ve been doing this Blackwatch schtick a while, and I know a prodigy when I see one. I believe in you because you have a whole lot of promise, you really do. And no matter what you wind up doing here, you’re gonna do good. Fucking fantastic. You wanna know why?” He swallowed back the lump rising in his own throat. “Cause you’re the one doing it, kid. You’re gonna be something incredible.”

It was true, all of it. Might have been the same things he wanted to hear at that age, but it was still true. Hopefully it helped.

If anything, Mccree sobbed harder, and Gabriel fought hard not to cry, himself. He gently pulled Mccree closer, threading fingers through his hair, greasy and tangled. He didn’t care.

“Christ. You’re seventeen, niño. You’re not gonna be perfect when you’re still learning. You’re never gonna be perfect. No one is. I’m sure as hell not. Everybody knows the only perfect person in the world is Athena.”

Mccree coughed a startled laugh into his shoulder.

“That’s not true, Gabriel. Flattery will get you nowhere,” Athena pointed out, voice echoing out of the speakers and bouncing off the stone walls.

“Don’t listen to her. She’s just trying to save face; she loves it.”

Mccree hiccuped out more wet laughter, and Gabriel smiled along with him, still softly running a hand over his back. 

They stood there for a long time. Gabriel rocked slightly from side to side, the same way his mother used to when he was little. The last time she’d had a chance he was Mccree’s age, and the first Omnic attacks had just hit Los Angeles. She got put on call and went to work at the hospital the next morning, and he hadn’t seen her since. The army went around the city and evacuated that afternoon. His wasn’t the only family to get split up. Even moreso, now, all of them remaining stuck so deep in witness protection they hardly existed anymore. It was a necessary precaution, and one of the first things he did upon getting control of Blackwatch. War heroes weren’t always popular. Never got a chance to speak with any of them after SEP, even. He still missed them.

Mccree eventually calmed down, went from sobbing to weeping, from weeping to hiccuping, from hiccuping to slightly uneven breathing. Pushed back, eventually, wiping at red eyes and a runny nose.

“Sorry,” he eked out.

“No need.”

The silence went awkward, after that. Gabriel tried to give Mccree some privacy while he cleaned up his face, and then they were just standing there in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes. Gabriel was the one who broke it. Sighed.

“Come here. I’ll show you how to wrap up your hands for real.” He reached over to the box and tossed one of the rolls to Mccree, who fumbled it, but snagged it before it hit the floor. Gabriel slumped crosslegged on the cement and Mccree settled across from him, still sniffling.

“You didn’t wrap up yours,” he pointed out, poking a finger at one of Gabriel’s bloodied knuckles.

“Yeah, well. We’re all a little self-destructive, huh?”

Mccree coughed out a wet chuckle. Gabriel unspooled the wrapping a little, folding the tail under his thumb.

“Alright, smartass. You’re gonna start with the end of the roll in your palm.”


	14. 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY IM STILL BAD AT PACING
> 
> SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH THO, HERES AN UPDATE /WITHOUT/ A THREE WEEK HIATUS

It had been seventeen days since Jesse left Deadlock. Fifteen since he’d stepped foot on Gibraltar and met Sokol, Ezra, and Angela. Eight days since his eye enhancement went in. Three since he’d broken down in the training room at 4 AM. 

And there were six days before the new Blackwatch recruits came in from basic training. 

Every morning he woke up in a cold sweat sometime between one and six, and every morning at 6:15 he went down to the little kitchenette down the hall for breakfast He’d wolf down anything not labeled in the fridge alongside a heaping bowl of granola, wash his dishes, and go to the training room where he’d do some mix of run, lift, or beat on a punching bag until Sokol came in at eight. She insisted he didn’t have to come so early, but he did anyway. Had to make sure his eye was perfectly synced, had make sure he was ready to hold his own against the newcomers. Had to make the cut. He stayed after Sokol dismissed him until she forced him out, usually around another four hours later, when he’d steal into the kitchenette again and either go visit Angela or hide away in his room. 

As much as he’d improved in the last few days, the routine was running him ragged. Didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep it up, but he’d never let himself think it. He was hellbent and determined, and if that meant he ran the same grueling schedule every day, that’s what he’d do. 

Only, this morning, things got… interesting. He woke up shaking, as had become the norm since the sleep aid Angie’d given him, and laid in bed with his eyes closed until his alarm went off for real. It wasn’t sleep, and it sure didn’t help as much as sleeping would have, but it was better than staying awake entirely. If he let himself fall too far, the aid would kick in and he’d have to fight his way out of it as it tried to pull him under with a sensation like being dragged down into something thicker than water. It was a sedative of some kind, but if he caught it early, he could shake it off alright and get out. The best method he’d found so far was to roll himself off the bed and onto the floor, and it usually got him back into the waking world, even if he was bruised and groggy. 

He didn’t have any problems with it this particular morning, though, for which he was grateful. He turned off his alarm when it went off and moved through the rest of his morning routine; brushed his teeth, washed his face, scrubbed his hair in the sink, and threw on his too-big clothes before he headed for the kitchenette. It was empty, as always, with the lights off save for those above the stove and what came through the window. A few leftover pancakes sat unlabeled in the fridge, and Jesse didn’t hesitate to finish them off. He grabbed the same bowl he did every morning-- one with a chip in the rim that reminded him of a flower petal-- and filled it with granola, then milk. No yogurt in the fridge. 

He heaved himself up onto the countertop and munched away in silence. He was about halfway done when someone turned on the light, and he froze.

Standing in the doorway was a young woman (?) with close cropped black hair stuck up on one side from laying on it, looked like, wearing a ratty old T-shirt with the words “EAT DIRT BE FREE” printed in purple text across the front, and a pair of green shorts that could have been boxers. 

For a solid few seconds, she just stared at him. He stared back. It took the lady at least three of looking at him for any sense of clarity to come into her eyes, and another one or two of squinting for her to apparently realize she had no idea who he was.

“Hey,” she said.

“...Howdy,” Jesse replied.

She reached up under her shirt and scratched at her chest. 

“Don’t mean to be rude, but, uh. Who the fuck are you?” She didn’t sound threatened, or all too upset, so Jesse refrained from throwing his bowl at her.

“I’m new,” he said instead.

“I figured.”

Jesse shoveled another mouthful of granola into his mouth, the first he’d moved since she’d come in. Lifted his spoon in lieu of waving.

“Mccree.”

“Nakano,” the lady-- he made a mental note to confirm the fact later-- weakly raised her arm, hand limp. He figured it was probably a wave. She paused and stared blankly into the floor for a moment before she looked up again, brow furrowed. “Wait. Mccree? Like, Reyes’ new gangrunner?”

Gangrunner? That sounded less than good. A lot less than good. Like something that would get him killed. Then again, Blackwatch had been safe so far. He took the risk.

“Is saying yes gonna to get my ass handed to me?”

She snorted, and that apparently moved her forward. “Nah.” She wandered over to the fridge, near where Jesse was sitting, and he managed to fight off the urge to bolt to the other side of the room. Since he’d talked to Reyes a few days ago, he didn’t feel quite as paranoid, at least. Nakano swung open the refrigerator door and proceeded to shove almost her entire upper body into it, digging around for something presumably tucked all the way in the back. Impressive, considering she had at least six or seven inches on Jesse.

“Defranco is gonna be so pissed I met you. Everyone’s been betting on whether you’re real or not. He’s got big money on you being a conspiracy.”

“Shit, I’m figured out.”

Nakano laughed, taking a swig out of an orange juice carton printed with that same name, Defranco, along with the words ‘NANO DO NOT TOUCH’ in black sharpie.  
“Where have you been, anyway? It’s been like, three weeks since Reyes came back.”

“Training.”

“Ooh, you gonna square off with the new kids next week?”

“Gonna try.”

She grinned, pulling a piece of bread from the loaf on the countertop and shoving it in her mouth plain. 

“You should come meet up with us for lunch or something, sometime. We’ll give you some tips. All the newbies come in exactly the same every year-- if you suss out their moves once, you’ve got them all down.”  
Jesse heaped another spoonful of his breakfast into his mouth, shrugging.

“I dunno. Figured I should probably keep my head down, y’know? ‘Gangrunners’ don’t seem like they’d be popular folks.”

Nakano raised her eyebrows and crammed the rest of her bread slice between her teeth. She used both hands to pull up the hem of her shirt to expose her belly, lanced through with a few scars and inked just above her hips with something written in what Jesse was fairly sure was kanji. 

He tried to make himself stop staring, because that was rude, but couldn’t help trying to pick out the different scars on her skin. Most were from sharp things, looked like; one or two might have been bullet grazes. One was an ugly, circular swell where it looked like she’d been shot. She dropped her shirt back down and started speaking again. 

“Oh, no. No one gives a shit at all. Like, half the people here are gangrunners, myself included.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, totally. I think you’re the first one out of Deadlock, though. Technically, I guess Soares counts, but she ran from there first, so.”

“Ran from Deadlock?” That was basically impossible. No one ran from Deadlock. The only way out was dying, or getting pretty damn close.

“Yeah. She skipped out on ‘em and joined up with some other crew. Pit Dogs, or something.”

“Pit Wolves.”

“Yeah! Yeah, those. They still around, even?”

“Used to be pretty big. Some of the older ones in Deadlock used to talk about ‘em, but apparently they’re just pissants, now.”

It felt weird to be talking about Deadlock, even though it hadn’t been very long since he’d left. He felt… dishonest, somehow. Like talking about gangs was going to make everyone in Blackwatch hate him, considering how much of an emphasis they put on loyalty.

“Deadlock took one of her legs for it, actually,” Nakano said.Talking about this Soares person, again. “Like, four toes, too. Her pinky finger, a knee.” She started listing them off on her hands. “I can’t even tell you how many scars.”

“Does that mean I should avoid her?” Jesse asked. Sounded like she had plenty reason to hate him, already.

“Huh? No, don’t even worry about it. Once you’re Blackwatch, you’re Blackwatch. Doesn’t matter where you came from, or we’d all have killed each other ages ago.”

“Oh.”

Nakano hummed tunelessly, shoving another plain piece of bread into her mouth.

“Seriously, though,” she slurred. “You should come by the mess hall, sometime. It feels a lot better once you start talking to people, trust me.”

“I might,” Jesse mumbled through his granola, and it was true. He actually was considering going down at lunch. Talking to some other people might be nice, really nice, especially if they were willing to give him a leg up against the military recruits. As always, the anxious, animalistically terrified part of his brain begged him otherwise, to stay in the routine he’d made because at least it kept him alive. He rolled the idea around his head alongside the granola in his mouth. There were dried strawberries it it. The granola, that is. Not his head.

He and Nakano sat in comfortable silence until Jesse finished his bowl and left, at which point she offered a sleepy goodbye and barely managed not to fall face first into a bowl of oatmeal. It was painfully charming in a way that was entirely human, probably born from not having been around many people for so long. If he was being honest, Jesse was thrilled to be in a group, to be a part of a unit. A family, his brain suggested, and he told himself to shut up. It was definitely true, though; he was at his best when he was surrounded by snarky remarks, bantered conversations, casual, fleeting affections. Angela leaned her back against his sometimes while they went over papers in her lab together, and it would become the highlight of his day. Meeting someone new who actually wanted him to come around sometime was overwhelmingly comforting. If he weren’t so dependent on interacting with other people, he probably wouldn’t have gone down to somewhere so popular for lunch. But as it was, Nakano’s invitation sounded like the best thing in the world.

The rest of his morning went as per routine, but he found himself excited about training being over. When Sokol dismissed him, he didn’t stay for any longer. He went to the mess hall, instead. Sokol seemed a little surprised to see him go, but didn’t ask. He felt a little bad leaving her out, and briefly considered asking if she wanted to go with. Decided not to. Didn’t seem like she liked being around very many people.

Jesse could feel his heart thumping in his windpipe as he walked down, now dressed in his uniform with his hat squarely on the top of his head, Kvonch’s knife tucked away at his back, just in case. They were both more for a sense of security than any practical use; he didn’t have any misconceptions about how fucked he’d be if one of the real agents picked a fight with him. The mess hall was packed, same as it was the first day Jesse’d come to Gibraltar, if not more so. As soon as he crossed the threshold into the room, he started to regret it. Like a shark to blood in the water, his brain started panicking. Where was he going to sit? What if he went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to? Crossed paths with someone he shouldn’t? Said the wrong thing? Someone saw his tattoo? Soares, whoever she was, decided now was a good time for holding grudges? What if--

“Oh, shit! Hey, Mccree! Over here!” 

At a table close to the wall, Nakano was standing upright in her seat and waving him over, grinning. Her hair wasn’t so wild, now, but it still stuck up in odd directions. Beside her sat two others, a curly haired woman and a man with the back of his head shaved, under which there was a black and red inking of a rose. 

Jesse put on his best confident grin and walked toward them. His heart still hurt when it hit the underside of his ribs.

“Howdy,” he drawled, tipping his hat. Nakano clapped a hand against the rose-guy’s back.

“I told you he was real! Hey, sit down,” she grinned, patting the table.

Jesse hesitantly settled a few spots away from the curly haired woman, and Nakano kept talking.

“This is Montreal,” she said, pointing at the her. “They’re the smart one.” Oh, whoops. Not a woman. Sorry.

“Coming from you that doesn’t mean all that much,” they pointed out.

“And this is Defranco! He’s a sore loser.”

“Fuck you,” Defranco snapped at Nakano, then Montreal. “Fuck you. And fuck _you_ in particular,” he snarled, pointing a finger at Jesse.

That was a more than a little concerning. Jesse was seriously considering making some excuse to get away from Defranco in particular, just to be safe, but Montreal reached across the table and swatted Defranco over the head before he got a chance.

“Don’t be rude,” they snapped. “And ‘fuck him’ for what? Not being a conspiracy?” 

“Exactly. Do you have any idea how much money I had riding on that? How does someone stay completely anonymous in a base full of Blackwatch agents, anyway?”

Jesse shrugged. “I spent most of the time in my room or training, and only used the lil’ kitchen when most folks were out here.”

Montreal nodded approvingly. “Clever.”

Defranco huffed and passed a wad of cash over the table into their hand.

“So,” Nakano began, shoving a menagerie of fruits toward Jesse. An apple, a banana, and an orange. He didn’t hesitate to go after the apple, first. “Mccree’s squaring off against the new kids next week.”

“Oh?” Montreal asked, leaning on their crossed arms and looking to Jesse, who was already about halfway done with his fruit. “You looking for advice?”

“If you’ve got any.”

They nodded, thoughtful. Nakano cut them off before they had a chance to speak.

“Hair pulling is totally allowed, and the newbies are never ready for it. It’ll work guaranteed for like, five or six rounds at least.”

Defranco shoved her sideways, but conceded the same. “It’s true, actually. It definitely got me the first time she did it.”

“You looked at me like I was going to eat your family!”

“You pulled my hair and _bit_ me. I started bleeding. There’s a fucking carbon copy of your teeth in my arm.”

As if to prove his point, he shoved his forearm in her face, on which Jesse could, in fact, see what was definitely a scarred-over bite mark. Nakano laughed.

Montreal spoke next. “Depending on how confident you are in your skills, you should consider showing off your tattoo,” they suggested, gesturing at his arm. “It can help you look more intimidating, throw them off. They’ll probably come at you twice as hard, though. They’ll be clumsy, but angry.” Shrugged. “Up to you whether it’s worth the risk, I suppose.”

It almost sounded like he was really going to be fighting with them. Like… actually facing off against them… in more than just training stats and observations…. Oh fuck. 

“Wait, uh, hang on.” The trio turned to him in varying degrees of intrigue. “I’m gonna be fighting ‘em? Like.” He punched a fist through the air. “Kind of fighting?”

“Yeah?” Nakano said. “Everyone around here calls it the, uh.” Snapped her fingers. “Fuck. Umm. Quick, Montreal, what’s the word in English? The gantoretto. Like the glove.”

“The gauntlet?”

“Yeah, yeah! That. It’s like a big, rotating schedule of spars where you go up against another newbie, then an agent, then another newbie. I mean, there’s other stuff, too, like the sim runs, but those are easy. Everybody stays for the _Gauntlet_ part of the gauntlet. Wanna see the smart ones come out. We place bets on who gets in.”

Putting aside all the information Nakano’d just dumped on him for later, he needed a minute to lose his shit. He was going to be brawling these actual, trained soldiers for a spot in Blackwatch, not just running the same routines he did in the gym. He’d perfected all his forms exactly, but was he good enough for a real fight, yet? Sokol said he was doing fine, but was he really? Was he fine enough? Was he good enough with his eye? He hadn’t been focusing enough on his depth perception, had he? It gave him a headache if he used to too long, and he’d been dumb enough to let that stop him from doing it anyway. Maybe if he just--  
“Don’t worry,” Montreal said, effectively cutting off his thoughts. “So long as you’re smart, you don’t have to be as good at fighting as they are. If you can out-think them, you’ve got an advantage.” 

If he could out-think them. Jesse… did he count as smart? He’d like to think so, sure. He’d take any advantage he could, at this point.

Defranco and Nakano stopped him before he could get too deep, this time. 

“Hey, speaking of out-thinking people, did you ever manage to get Reyes in chess?”

“Oh, yeah. Did you get him, finally?”

“No. I thought I did, but it turned out to be a trick.”

The conversation drifted away to more lighthearted things, after that. Jesse stayed tuned into it easily, found himself making suggestions and sniping across the table over the course of the lunch hour until the mess hall was significantly more empty. He politely declined their offer to play board games and excused himself back to the training rooms, feeling significantly lighter. 

He kept rolling over the idea of sparring against other people in his head. The thought made him less anxious, now, not so worried anymore about others in his space. Sure, it still set him on edge, but less so. His primary concern was that he wasn’t varied enough. He could admit he did well sparring against Sokol, but that was only against Sokol. For all he knew, he just had an advantage fighting her, somehow, or that she pulled her punches against him. Sure didn’t feel like it, but who knew. 

He reached the gym and had just begun wrapping up his knuckles when Sokol walked in. 

“Oh, hey Sokol.”

She frowned, pulling the boxing tape out of his hands. “Hello, Mccree. How long have you been here?”

He shrugged. “Five minutes, maybe?”

“Really?” she asked, and sounded genuinely surprised to hear it.

“Yeah, actually. I was in the mess hall.” He tried, and failed, to keep the giddy pride out of his voice, and immediately felt his insides heat up in embarrassment. He wasn’t a little kid. No reason to get excited about stuff like that. Sokol seemed elated about it, though.

“That’s fantastic! Did you get to speak with anyone?”

“Yeah!” Her excitement was infectious, and fueled his own. “Met Nakano this morning, and she was the one who invited me down. Introduced me to Defranco and Montreal. They’re nice. Gave me some pointers on how to fight through the Gauntlet.”

“Montreal was in the same class I was. They’re brilliant, more than I think I’ll ever be.”

“Not true,” Jesse pointed out, but Sokol kept going.

“I’m glad those three are giving you some advice. They’re all excellent agents.” She smiled at him, softer than usual. “I’m very happy to see you start finding a place here.”

He grinned back. “I don’t know if I’d say that, but it was real nice talking with ‘em.”

She nodded, looking pleased. “I’ll let you work, then.” She moved to turn around, but Jesse cut her off.

“Sokol, hang on. You think I’m ready for this? Nakano and all them told me about the Gauntlet, today. I didn’t realize I’d be _fighting_ these guys. You think I can even do that?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really? I’m sorry, then. I should have explained it better. But to answer your question, I definitely think you can.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. You can hold your own against me, and I’d like to think I’m a little better than fresh recruits,” she laughed. “Even if I am just a stiff.”

Jesse frowned. “Hey, Sokol, don’t say that. You’re not... I don’t think you’re boring. I like talking to you. Whoever convinced you that you’re not ‘s an asshole.”

She tilted her head at him in the way that meant she was confused. “Pardon? I don’t und-- Oh!” She laughed out loud, the most he’d heard since he met her. He’d heard more the more he got to know her, though. It was wispy and quiet, like the way she talked. “No, no. I meant I’m not a field agent. Blackwatch calls us stiffs, though I’m not sure exactly why. Not to be disrespecting, at all; I’m treated very nicely by everyone. Commander Reyes puts a lot of emphasis on being kind to agents like me.” She smiled at him, and it was almost painfully genuine. “I appreciate the compliment, though. No one’s said that to me before.”

Jesse rubbed the back of his neck. 

“Oh, uh. Sorry,” he mumbled.

Sokol tilted her head at him. “What for?”

“For jumping to conclusions, I guess? I probably sound like a condescending jackass. And that’s, y’know, that’s the opposite of what I was trying for, so, uh. I guess. I’m sorry for making it weird? If I made it weird at all? Hell. Sorry for this trainwreck of a conversation, Sokol.”

She blinked at him for a moment, quiet, Jesse could see the wheels turning in her head as she thought about something. Probably trying to process all the garbage he’d just spat at her. 

“You can call me Mina, if you’d like.”

“... Mina?”

She nodded and tugged on a piece of her hair, which meant she felt awkward about it.

“In a few days you won’t be my trainee, anymore, and I’ll just be one of your coworkers. So there’s no need for the formality towards me, if you don’t want.”

First names were a rare thing in Blackwatch, he’d come to understand. Very few people called each other by their names that he’d heard at all. The only ones thusfar had been Angela calling him ‘Jesse’, and Athena, Torbjorn, and Jack calling Reyes ‘Gabriel.’ From what he understood, Sokol offering the option to him meant she really thought of him as a friend of hers. The thought left a pleasant warm feeling in his chest. 

“Only way I’m callin’ you Mina is if you call me Jesse, you know.”

She frowned. “You don’t have to extend the same to me, Mccree.”

“Bein’ friends is a two-way street, Sokol.”

She gaped at him for a moment, mouth slightly ajar and eyebrows nearly swallowed entirely by her bangs. Had he said the wrong thing? Was that rude?

“You’d really think of me as a friend of yours?” she asked, incredulous. Jesse’d feel more concerned by the disbelief in her voice if it hadn’t come out so quiet.

“Course I would,” he assured her. Only, maybe saying so was too presumptuous. “I mean. If that doesn’t bother you. Sorry if that was me jumping to conclusions.”

She tipped her head at him again, but this time, instead of the face she made when she was confused, she smiled at him.

“Not at all. ...I should leave you to train, though. Have. Have a good day. Jesse.” She tripped over his name like it was her first time saying a bad word, hushed and a little giddy at saying something special. She was still beaming. Jesse grinned back.

“You too, Mina,” he said, and threw a finger gun at her. She startled a little at hearing her own name, and it made him wonder the last time anyone’d used it.

She was still smiling when she walked away and Jesse started going after the punching bag. The warmth in his chest only grew knowing he was the one who caused it. Done something positive, for once. Once he was sure the room was empty, he privately hopped around on his feet a bit, laughing and hugging his arms around his sides.

He’d made _friends_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always suggestions are welcome!! unless yr the gender person sayin i have an 'agenda,' in which case yr absolutely right


	15. 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GGHNSKR SORRY THAT WAS A WHILE  
> ALSO I APOLOGIZE IF MY PACINGS A LIL WONKY, AS ALWAYS

He had so much fucking paperwork. The desk was stacked with it; manilla folders laid on top of one another, stray pieces of printer paper sticking out and spilled across the surface, scrawled in ink or, more commonly, typed out in Arial size twelve, almost identical to the dozens before them. Each began with the words ‘Commander Reyes’ and the more times Gabriel had to read the same thing over and over, the more mocking it sounded in his head, pounding against his skull like a drum. 

It didn’t help that Jack had called a few hours earlier, and they had a tense and awkward conversation that took up the majority of his morning. Got nowhere from it, just more dancing around the issue and each other, making petty jabs when they got pissed off instead of coming out and saying it, and then apologizing for being passive aggressive, and repeating the cycle all over again. Exhausting.

It left him high strung and emotionally drained, with neither the patience nor the energy to spit bureaucratic bullshit to Upstairs about why Blackwatch agents were seen on one of the missions while he was gone (they were assisting civilians) and assuring them it wouldn’t happen again (it would, and they could eat shit). Upstairs didn’t give a damn that four of his people had been shot on that particular mission, or that two of those four were still in the med bay two weeks later. Upstairs never cared about what happened to his agents, so long as the mission got done. It was part of what made Gabriel hate them so much. And they hated him because he believed the opposite. So, they both acted civil when they exchanged correspondences and spat venom between their teeth at one another with pseudo-politeness tucked between the lines, like two suburban mothers at a barbecue. 

He had a dozen notices and inquiries about the new recruits and what his plans for training them were, all of which not-so-gently urging him to do it a different way to get higher acceptance rates and more agents out in the field. He was going to ignore them and do the same training run he did every year, obviously; more agents didn’t mean jack shit if they were _bad_ agents, but it didn’t matter to Upstairs how well they performed, so long as they finished the job. Reyes’ people were mostly criminals, anyways, so who cared if people died when there were more recruits to replace them a year later, right? 

His agents fucking cared, that’s who. 

Gabriel spat the mangled end of a pen out of his mouth, fuming, and stood up. He paced back and forth around his office, muttering under his breath and turning the inside of his cheek to hamburger. 

It was an awful habit --he’d freely admit to that-- but he didn’t feel like trying to stop. He’d done it since before he’d even enlisted, and figured it was just an unbreakable behavior by now, after everything. During the Crisis, he swore every waking second tasted like blood from how bad he’d chewed on his mouth. At any given time, his teeth were smudged pink and licking his chapped, split lips would turn them ruby red. _Jack’s face would usually be dotted the same color in little patches across his lips, knuckles, cheeks, and forehead like lipstick smears. Ana’s fingers would look the same when she grabbed him by the chin and wiped the blood off his face, snapping at him to cut it out before his stupid mouth got infected, it’s filthy out here, Gabi. Torbjorn’s sleeves, too, when he did the same. Little spots on Reinhardt’s shoulder when he wrapped Gabriel in a hug in attempts to make him feel less stressed._ He still got like that, sometimes, if he had particularly rough nights. 

He scared the shit out of a unit of his own agents on a mission, once, knocked back a cup of water and spat it out in the sink, bright red like the imprint of his lip smeared on the mouth of the glass. They’d worried for him, made him sit down and have the unit’s medic look him over for something internal, offered to take watches while he rested or play cards or talk about it until he begged them to shut up, laughing and shoving them off where they hung on his shoulders and arms like children, and his mouth didn’t taste like iron. 

Upstairs didn’t see that. They didn’t see that his agents were people. 

He was halfway through another angry lap around the desk when Athena interrupted him.

“Commander, you have a call waiting,” she patiently informed him.

“Not now,” Gabriel snarled back. He’d apologize for his tone later. It wasn’t her fault he was in a bad mood. 

“It’s agent Soares.”

He lunged for the pickup fast enough to knock a stack of papers off the desk. Didn’t care. As soon as his fingers brushed the key, the screen lit up on the wall above the sofa, projecting a very tired-looking Soares grinning back at him.

“Hola, jefe,” she rasped. 

“Oh, thank fuck. How long have you been awake?” He couldn’t keep the relief from his voice, so he didn’t try. Nineteen days, she’d been unconscious. More than touch-and-go for some of it, and as much as he’d tried to ignore it, it shook Gabriel to his core.

She grimaced. “Uh, fifteen minutes, maybe? Long enough to scare a nurse and get you on call.”

Gabriel sat down in his chair, one eyebrow raised. Not that he wasn’t positively elated to see her alive, but.

“The hell are you calling me for?”

“One,” Soares said, weakly raising a hand and failing to fold down the rest of her fingers. “I knew you’d be losing your shit and you’d come see me anyway.” True. “And two,” she shook her hand again, still failing to accurately move any number of digits. “I wanted to snitch on someone.”

Gabriel snorted. “Already? Jesus, Soares, it’s a miracle you’re even alive.” She steamrolled over him as if he’d never said anything at all.

“I woke up just in time to see Connors wheeling Martin out of recovery, and they bought my silence with information.”

“Generally, ‘buying your silence’ means you’re not going to tell anyone, particularly not your commanding officer,” he pointed out. Soares waved him off. He wouldn’t admit out loud, but just hearing her voice again, raspy and disused as it was, made the world seem that much less daunting.

“I’m a bitch, and they should have known that.” She tipped her head back and cackled, stopping halfway to cough and cringe from jostling her injuries. Gabriel and one of the medics both snapped at her not to strain herself, but she kept up a wheezy chuckle. “Anyway. Connors and Martin snuck out because they wanted to see the paintball game.”

“Paintball game?” A Blackwatch favorite: agents got to shoot each other and fulfill vendettas without consequences, usually trashing at least one training room in the process. Drove the medics up the walls, having to treat more severe scrapes, cuts, and occasional broken noses. People complained about tasting paint for weeks afterwards, but would set up another game, anyway. 

Soares grinned, all teeth. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it warmed Gabriel’s heart to see her toothy, feral smile again nonetheless.

“Oh yeah. Apparently Montreal and their crew started it to kick the shit out of the new kid.”

Gabriel very nearly fell out of his chair.

“They what?”

“Newbie wanted training from the big dogs, so Nakano and Defranco suggested a round of paintball. Course newbie ate shit, but after three or four times folks started coming for a real game. Kid keeps jumping in there, apparently.” Soares scratched her chin. “Seems like they’re a real crowd favorite. When'd you pick that one up, anyway? I didn’t sleep through the Gauntlet, did I? Fuck, that would suck.”

Getting shot didn’t stop her from being chatty.

“Deadlock sting couple days after you got hit. You said he _asked_ Nakano and Defranco to fight him?”

“Yup.” Soares popped the ‘p’ between her lips like bubblegum. “Deadlock, huh?” She grinned, toothy and vicious again. “Definitely gonna give him shit for that.”

“Don’t,” Gabriel ordered.

“No promises,” she snarked, but he knew she wouldn’t. Soares didn’t break orders if they came from him. Never. He at once appreciated and hated it-- blind loyalty like that would get her hurt, _had_ gotten her hurt on more than one occasion. She never went against direct orders, though, despite him telling her she could. 

“Son of a bitch,” he swore, dragging a hand over his face. He needed to go make sure Mccree wasn’t dead or on his way to it. He briefly considered letting the situation work itself out while he finished paperwork, and immediately kicked himself for being a selfish bastard. He also didn’t want to hang up on Soares-- she was one of his closest friends, practically risen from the dead. She beat him to the punch before he got a chance to make the choice himself, as always.

“Tell me everything later, jefe. Pretty sure nurse just turned up my dosage-- dunno how much longer before I’m drooling.” She cackled again, and again, a medic shouted at her. 

“Alright. Don’t die while I’m gone, please.”

“No promises.” She leaned her head back into the pillow, beaming her horrific smile at the ceiling and chuckling. “Dios, I’m so fucking high.” 

The video cut off, and Gabriel dragged his hands down his face, sighing. He was so tired. But he’d been tired before, and he wasn’t going to let it stop him from doing his job. So he dragged his boots out from under his desk and pulled them back on before he shut down his monitor and left for the training rooms, a little too hasty to be considered ‘calm.’ 

Mccree was an anxious kid. Gabriel understood that, he could relate. Blackwatch was full of anxious kids. Mccree was new, though. He probably didn’t get Blackwatch affections the same way the others did. To an outsider, it looked like they were all seconds from tearing each other apart, when in reality, it was completely the opposite. Throwing punches, sparring, snarking, vicious paintball matches-- all of them were friendly. Part of the dynamic, especially for field agents. Being field meant being stuck with the same cast of people for weeks on end, like it or not, and a sense of camaraderie came from it that nothing else could really replicate. Missions meant sleeping in close-knit piles like cats, holding someone’s hand on watch, spending days and hours clinging to the people around you, because any moment with them could be the last, but it also meant threatening to kill someone for using the last of the milk, wrestling on the floor for using someone else’s toothbrush, and arguing over who got which rooms in the safehouses they holed up in. Blackwatch was just a very dysfunctional family that was particularly prone to violence. It was daunting, at first.

Today’s unlucky paintball victim was room 2A. The door was closed, which meant there was a match going on, so Gabriel took the elevator up to the observation deck, instead. As soon as the doors opened, he was hit with a wall of sound and the chemical reek of paintballs hard enough to send him reeling. For a moment as he gathered his bearings, the whole room looked like a white, explosive mass of stimuli, dotted through with violent smears of color and neons. Against the windows dozens of Blackwatch agents were plastered to the glass, cheering and whooping, pointing fingers and smearing paint all over each other, orange and green and blue and red and pink and yellow and ugly mashes in between, smudged underneath with purple bruises blooming under red welts on their skin. A single couch and coffee table sat in the middle of the room, on and around which were piled another mountain of people, chugging bottles of water and huddling around a nest of biotic emitters. Folwell was gleefully tucked behind a desk in the corner below a chalkboard hastily scribbled with upcoming matches, counting away bills and candies piled on the surface. Gabriel walked over to him.

“The fuck is going on?” he shouted at Folwell to be heard over the crowd.

“What’s it look like?”

“Looks like you’re all cleaning the training rooms.” He reached out to snag a hard candy from the desk, but Folwell smacked his hand away, hunching over slightly to prevent anyone from getting to his stash, hissing between his teeth. 

Gabriel left him be and instead walked up to the agent closest to him, face pressed up against the glass.

“Who’s up?” he asked. They looked only a little surprised to see him, but not guilty. 

“Oh, hey, Reyes.” His name spread fast, and Gabriel received a chorus of greetings from around the room, but otherwise the crowd continued as if he’d never entered at all. Aside from Connors and Martin, that is, who looked a whole lot like his little sisters when he caught them sneaking sweets before dinner. “It’s Mccree against Defranco, right now.”

“Who’s winning?”

“Dunno,” they chirped. Upon closer inspection, he identified them as Hakim beneath the matted, paint-chunked mess of hair hanging over their eyes. Gabriel nodded, and stood there to watch, absently wiping Hakim’s hair from their face and gluing it to the soaked mass on their head proper. His hands came away an unpleasant medley of bright orange and green, but he wiped it off on the back of Hakim’s shirt, who snorted and shoved him sideways. 

Below them, Defranco ducked behind one of the pillars in the generated environment, the floor made of hexagonal plates that could be raised and lowered to simulate more challenging scenarios. 

Defranco shoved another round of paintballs into his gun while he had cover, and lunged out from behind one pillar to another, narrowly being missed by a shot that exploded orange against the wall a moment later. Gabriel followed it to Mccree, who was pressed against the side of another panel of the floor to make himself harder to hit, moving just enough so Defranco would have one hell of a time getting him with his rifle. 

Mccree had a pistol in hand, nailing the walls just inches from where Defranco was standing, but failing to hit him head-on. The spatter of paint on the environment left Defranco spotted orange, however, making him light up under the flourescent lights. He was a sniper, but he’d been effectively disadvantaged without the ability to sneak away to a better shot. 

Mccree rolled behind a column and slammed a new clip into his gun, back out in a second and darting across the field. It left him open, and Defranco took a close shot before Mccree managed to hit a chunk of wall near his head, smattering one side of his plastic visor with orange and giving himself a moment to get away. 

They danced around for another two or three minutes before Defranco got his shot in. Mccree closed on him, just barely missed hitting his gut, Defranco swinging sideways at the last moment and bringing his gun up to his shoulder. Mccree was already hurling himself behind cover by the time Defranco pulled the trigger. He moved a split second too slow-- whether it was the paint making the floors slick, or exhaustion, or simply for lack of speed, Gabriel didn’t know-- and Defranco’s paintball clipped him cross the side of the head, exploding bright blue over his hair and the wall and sending him sprawling across the floor. Mccree’d lost the match.

Around Gabriel, the room erupted into anarchy, screaming and cheering, shoving each other, shaking people by the shoulders, about half surging over to Folwell and half collapsing where they stood and lamenting the loss of whatever they bet on. Beside Gabriel and Hakim, the elevator opened up and out stumbled both Mccree and Defranco, the latter with an arm hooked under Mccree’s shoulders, heaving out a laugh rare to see without Nakano nearby. 

Mccree looked like absolute trash, smothered in enough paint to be a nearly unrecognizable mass of ugly grey-brown smears of every color they had on hand, visibly bruised, dry blood under his nose, one side of his lip was swollen and busted, and Gabriel swore the side of his head where Defranco got him was bleeding. Nonetheless, he was laughing against Defranco the same, made only louder by Nakano’s bolting across the room and looping her arm under his other shoulder, using her free hand to shake Defranco by the front of his uniform, screaming in wordless congratulation. 

“You look like you got hit by a fucking bus, kid,” Gabriel pointed out, once they were close enough. He was only a little (very) worried about his psychological state, given he’d just been shot in the head, but Mccree seemed fine. Totally fine. Spitting paint out of his mouth and shooting finger guns at anyone who addressed him, like it was the natural thing to do. Back into the confident code switch, it looked like. Of course, it was definitely the right thing in the current situation; the other agents were loving it.

“Commander,” Defranco gasped, very out of breath. His forehead was sheened with a more than thin layer of sweat, and he also looked as if he’d been through the wringer, albeit far less so than Mccree. 

Gabriel flashed a smile. “Nice shot, Defranco,” he said, because it was, and positive reinforcement was good for morale. 

“Right?” Nakano crowed. “Got Mccree in mid-motion! Like, some matrix shit! Did you see it? It was awesome!” She shook Defranco by the shirt again, and he laughed. 

Joined at the hip, those two, Nakano sung his praises like her life depended on it almost as often as she spilled embarrassing stories about him. Defranco wasn’t so lauding, but gods have mercy on anyone who talked poorly of Nakano. They were painfully endearing, but then again, Gabriel found just about everyone in Blackwatch painfully endearing. Probably with an emphasis on ‘painfully,’ but he had a definite soft spot for each of his agents nonetheless.

“Aww, Reyes, you’re just sayin’ that,” Mccree grinned, slurring a little around his fat lip. Gabriel followed the three of them to the sofa in the center, slumping both Mccree and Defranco in front of the piled up biotic emitters. Gabriel shoved someone--Richmond-- sideways to make room for himself on the couch and sat down, one eyebrow raised.

“No, really. You look awful.”

Mccree waved him off, leaning back against an empty cardboard box dropped on the floor with a rock inside to keep it still, placed on the ground for the specific purpose it was being used: a Slouch Box.

“Don’t worry. Feels worse than it looks.”

Defranco heaved another breathy chuckle, pressed against Nakano’s side with one of her arms over his shoulders.

“Sorry. I was aiming for your visor.”

Mccree laughed. “Ain’t a need for apologies.” His voice came out a little clumsy, and Montreal appeared at his side with a water bottle he downed quickly. 

“Commander Reyes,” they greeted.

“Montreal. Done any matches?”

They settled against the Slouch Box beside Mccree, politely keeping their distance from touching. They took a long sip from their own open water bottle before offering the remaining to Mccree, who took it graciously.

“A few,” they said.

“You win any?”

They cracked a small smile. “Of course.” 

Gabriel’d already figured that was the answer, judging by the nearly complete lack of paint on their person, but figured he’d ask anyway.

“So was this shitshow your fault or Nakano’s?” he snarked, teasing. Nakano shrugged and said ‘sorry’ in a way that sounded not at all guilty at the same time Montreal raised their eyebrows.

“A little bit of both. Defranco was there,” they pointed out.

“Don’t try to throw me under the bus, you fucker,” Defranco barked, sounding far more venomous than he really was. 

Montreal raised their hands helplessly, entirely unperturbed. 

“I’m getting better, though. It’s helping,” Mccree piped up where he sat on the floor, absently poking at the side of his head. All three of the older agents nodded. Defranco shifted where he sat.

“He beat me and Nakano a few times. Not together, obviously--” Obviously. Beating those two together was nigh impossible for most.

“--But he came close!” Nakano finished for him, leaning forward far enough to jostle them both. Defranco jabbed her in the side. 

After a few minutes without conversation, Gabriel got up from his spot on the couch-- it was quite literally snatched out from under him almost the instant that he did-- and he returned to the observation window, watching another set of people duke it out on the floor, leaving smatters of fresh paint on the walls. Another four rounds, and Folwell called out the next set in the order: Capello and Stevenson against Krieg and Mccree, of all people, who heaved himself up from where he sat tucked into the biotic field, picked up a gun, and happily marched back out onto the floor as if he didn’t look like a walking punching bag. 

He and Krieg lost, but just barely. Took out Stevenson at the cost of Krieg, but Capello got a lucky shot on Mccree afterwards. The kid stumbled back upstairs and planted himself right where he’d been before, slugged back another bottle of water and dealt with the buzzing itchiness that came from spending generous amounts of time around an active emitter, judging from the frequency he scratched at his arms and squirmed as he sat. He wasn’t the only one, of course; about a dozen agents were in the field and doing the same at any given time. 

Another three rounds, and Mccree went up _again_. Same as before, but this time he won against the opposing team by the grace of something, and he trudged back to his niche in the glowing yellow circle in the center of the room. Gabriel found himself nodding thoughtfully, chewing away at his cheek, though not so much to make it bleed. 

“Folwell,” he barked, and Fowell dropped his glasses down his nose to peer at him, one eyebrow quirked up. “Put me in two rounds up.”

Folwell’s face turned into a wicked, gleeful smile and he bounced a little in his chair, giddy. The word spread through the room in a matter of seconds, and suddenly, everyone was twitchy and excited as if they’d been shot up with more adrenaline than they knew what to do with. Gabriel didn’t set his unit, yet. It was more fun to see all the agents buzz like bees on the edges of their seats, energized him and made smiles appear on nearly every face in the room. 

The next rounds went almost painfully fast, probably thrown to see the commander in action. Almost as soon as the last match ended, he was surrounded entirely by a semicircle of people, all twitchy and fanatic.

“Pick your set, boss,” Folwell called out. He was just as excited as everyone else, if not more so, knowing he’d be getting a massive pile of bets placed on his table he was most definitely snitching from under the guise of ‘interest.’

“Who’s up for it?” Gabriel asked the crowd, and a roomful of hands shot into the air, deathly silent. Clamoring for him wouldn’t make a difference, so instead, the air was turned solid and tense in the quiet. “Connors, put your hand down before I notice you and Martin snuck out of recovery.”

Connors’ hand went down. 

“Montreal, with me.” A chorus of ‘oohs’ went up as Montreal stood up and came to his side, looking surprised but pleased with the development. “Hakim, Defranco, Nakano on opposition.”

Nakano screeched triumphantly as her name was called, heaving Defranco up with her and pummeling her fists through the air. Hakim startled at being called, but their whole face lit up in delight as they came to stand across from him beside his teammates. Gabriel nodded to himself, again, and made his final pick.

“Mccree, you up to go back in the ring?”

At the sound of his name, Mccree swung around, eyes huge and brows very nearly vanishing underneath his paint-matted bangs. 

“You serious?” He stumbled upright as he asked it, shaking out his arms as he came to stand by Montreal’s side. “Hell yeah.”

Gabriel took one of the first guns handed to him: a combat rifle-- he loved his agents so much-- smattered in yellow, and went down the elevator with the rest of his set. Upon reaching the lower level, he flagged a hand to the right, and Hakim’s team went left. As they waited on their respective sides, the floor shifted into a new configuration, making the room look and feel entirely alien.

“What’s our plan?” Gabriel asked. Montreal opened their mouth to speak, but Mccree cut them off before they got chance, without realizing. 

“First thing is finding wherever Defranco’s gonna hide-- Nakano’s gonna cover him. Dunno about Hakim. Never fought ‘em.”

Gabriel was briefly taken aback by the confidence with which the statement had been delivered, but Mccree apparently realized then who he was teamed up with and sunk into his shoulders, ears turning pink.

“Er. Sorry.”

“No,” Montreal said. “That’s a good strategy. Hakim is a ground fighter, like Nakano. They’ll probably stay grouped up.” Their eyes flicked to Gabriel.

“You’re right. Montreal, find Defranco and report when you do. Mccree, you’re with me. I’m weak on my ranged capabilities, need you to shoot when I can’t. Don’t wait for my orders,” he commanded. “If you have a shot, take it.”

Mccree gaped at them both, but after a moment, he nodded.

“Alright.”

Seconds later, the blare of the speakers went off with a grainy airhorn noise, and all three of them surged forward. True to the plan, Montreal was gone in an instant, Mccree with his gun up and loaded at Gabriel’s back, swinging around in a half-circle, eyes always moving. Gabriel ducked behind cover and Mccree followed as they quietly danced their way around the ring, heads down and always moving to make them harder targets if Defranco was up high. 

Gabriel could hear the shuffle of feet around the room, but the layout made it impossible for him to know who it came from, or where. The synthetic stench of paint and sweat left him more disoriented than he cared to admit.

The first shot came from a rifle, an explosive and earth shattering snap though the air that cracked against the floor when it made contact. Not near Gabriel and Mccree, but on the other side of the room for sure, so that’s where Gabriel went, loping over the uneven ground and keeping his eyes open for any signs of movement. He saw a blur of blue dart between two pillars, followed by a smattering of green pops over the ground that just barely failed to land on target. 

“Defranco’s rifle has blue,” Mccree said, unnecessarily. The whole right side of his skull was plastered the same color. It meant Montreal was hit, though. Not anything that would be fatal it the bullets were real-- mortal wounds meant an out-- but it meant Defranco had found them first.

Gabriel nodded in acknowledgement and waved a hand to signal their going forward to flank the others. They slunk around the room to where the shot had come from, and rounding another massive trunk of floor panels revealed Nakano, Hakim, and Defranco all standing together, packed behind a raised tile with their eyes on the direction Montreal had fled, leaving their sides wide open to Gabriel and Mccree. 

Gabriel sprung out from behind cover at the same moment Mccree fired a shot off his pistol, covering the side of Defranco’s face in bright orange as the sniper shieked in alarm. Nakano and Hakim recovered instantly, guns up and firing at Gabriel as he made his approach. The drawn fire let Mccree get another shot off, this one hitting Hakim in the shoulder. Would have been square in their heart, had they not jerked sideways to avoid it. Both Mccree and Gabriel dove behind cover as the opposing team got their bearings fully, narrowly escaping a slew of paintballs that coated the environment in a mix of green and pink. 

Mccree went around a section of constructed walls to arrive in the same spot as Gabriel, flecked with bits of paint. 

“So, Nakano’s gonna have an agenda on me, now,” he heaved. That was true, and a vengeance-hungry Nakano was a force to be reckoned with.

Montreal appeared beside them the same Mccree had, shoulder streaked with bright blue. 

“I found Defranco,” they deadpanned. Gabriel chuckled and reloaded his gun. As soon as he made sure both his teammates had done the same, he leaned out from behind the pillar and sprayed Nakano and Hakim’s cover with bright yellow, giving Montreal and Mccree another chance to line up their shots. 

The next time Gabriel spattered the tiles, however, Nakano and Hakim both sprinted out from behind it, taking to opposite sides of another dugout across from Gabriel’s team. He yanked Mccree back by the scruff of the shirt at the same time a paintball very nearly annihilated his visor, exploding blue on the ground a split second later.

He traced the shot back to Nakano, who crouched behind her hiding place with Defranco’s rifle braced against her shoulder, face deliberately striped orange with the same color paint Mccree’d used to shoot him down. Hakim stopped Montreal from trying to go around their other side with a mist of pink paint that left their otherwise (mostly) clean uniform significantly more colorful than before. Nothing direct, but plenty of blowback from the paintballs popping open. 

The five of them stayed locked in a stalemate for two minutes at least, trading shots and stopping every now and again to reload, Nakano switching often between her own, faster rifle and Defranco’s precision one. Hakim kept up a steady stream of suppressing fire that stopped them from trying to advance, but Gabriel did the same, up until Nakano got him between shots. 

Gabriel lifted his gun as he retreated behind cover to reload, and it was in that moment she switched back to Defranco’s rifle and pulled the trigger before she even lined up the sight, punching Gabriel’s chest with blue just below his heart. A real bullet would have punctured his lung, and without a medic on hand it would’ve been fatal to most, but. 

He grabbed the pistol from Montreal’s hand and nailed Nakano square in the gut, sending her tumbling backwards to hit the ground with a dull thud.

“Boss,” she shouted. “I got you!”

“Super soldier,” Gabriel barked back, grinning. “Doesn’t count.”

“Oh, you’re _so_ cheating,” Montreal gasped, mock scandalized. They were smiling, and he shrugged.

“I’m _so_ your commander, and I do what I want,” he shot back.

Mccree laughed. 

A moment later, though, he soon found himself entirely overwhelmed by the paint-soaked force of both Nakano and Defranco tackling him around the middle, taking all three of them to the ground like a sack of bricks. Mccree made a fervent attempt to shoot Nakano again, but was similarly felled by Defranco lunging upright and smothering Mccree’s face in orange paint, same as his own.

Hakim slowly came to stand by Montreal, watching the four of them roll around the floor, slapping each other with paint like toddlers. It looked like they were both staying out of it, up until Montreal shot Hakim almost point blank with Gabriel’s shotgun, coating them both in bright yellow. They were quickly dragged into the paint fight, as well.

Gabriel dragged himself upright once he’d decided he’d had enough, slogging Nakano up with him, one of her arms wrapped around his neck and laughing so hard she could barely stand. Defranco was much the same, heaving out wheezy laughter while Mccree spat paint out of his mouth, his face now entirely orange. Hakim looked far worse for wear than Montreal did, smothered in a motley of colors and pouting at their far-too-smug grin. Eventually, they all got their feet under them and trundled back upstairs, where they were instantly mobbed by a wave of people, laughing and patting shoulders and, in Mccree’s unlucky case, being the victim of noogies that spattered wet paint onto anyone within range. Still, he was laughing, and Gabriel didn’t worry so much anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my dummb ass, already writing a massive fic i can barely keep updated: Good Thing There Is Only This One
> 
> my shit brain, once again threatening me w Temptation: hey? u should ? writee a hanzo fic ?


	16. quick survey ??

hey lads i realize that in recent chapters esp its been a lot of those misc blackwatch agents and not so many established characters n i wanted to ask if it was getting to be too much?? like is it starting to feel like theres not enough canon characters involved n if thats changing how interested u are in the story?

tbh im not sure really at all where to go w the plot bc im currently in a bit of a Depression Slump n i cant find mcbeans as fun as i did before and i dunno if that the depression or because i wrote myself into a box n i wanted an outside perspective !! so? what do yall think ? if u hav any plot suggestions or just suggestions in general id welcome em bigtime !!!

 

theres a few points i wanna include but they likely wouldnt show up for a while:  
-genji !!!!!!! hed be a real big one obviously n that would come with its own narrative strings  
-jesses family (theyr very loving, No Abuse As A Plot Device In My House)  
-by extension, gabe actually adopting everyones favorite gay cowboy  
\- ??????

so id love to hear what you think !!!!! ill delete this page before i post the new chapter, or ill leave it up if u guys want a kinda idea-pitching board? ?? but ya any suggestions or input you got id love to hear !!!!!!!!


	17. 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OHHHH MY GOD YALL LEFT SO MANY NICE COMMENTS ON THE SURVEY PAGE THING I POSTED BLESS YR HEARTS
> 
> YOU FUELED ME W ENOUGH STRENGTH TO GET THIS FUCKER DONE AND OUT OF THE WAY
> 
> NEXT CHAP WILL VERY LIKELY CONTAIN: DANGEROUS AMOUNTS OF AMARIS, POSSIBLY BABY MISSION SHENANIGANS BASED ON HOW POORLY I PACE IT

“Chances are, you’re not Blackwatch material. We’ve gone years without a single agent getting in, before. Don’t think you’re special.”

Jesse shot a glance at Mina from where he stood in a line alongside the other recruits, crammed into the middle of the lineup and feeling painfully small. She didn’t look away from Reyes as he spoke; both hands folded behind her back as she stood on one of the training mats blanketing the floor. There was an agent standing at each one, all identically posed and facing the string of recruits against the wall. Montreal was in a farther corner, carefully picking over each of the recruits with a critical eye. They skipped Jesse, and it left his guts feeling fluttery and misplaced. Was that a good sign? A bad one?

“If you are unfit for field work, you may still be accepted as a stationary agent,” Ezra said in his musical voice, standing on Reyes’ left side with his arms loosely tucked behind him, his holopad in hand. 

“And if you’re shit for both, you go to Overwatch, or you get lost,” the woman at Reyes’ right spoke, grinning with her lips pulled back to bare her teeth. She was smaller than most everyone Jesse’d met so far, an inch or so smaller than even Angie, but built like a brick shithouse. She was about the same pallor as Jesse, sun-weathered and rough around the edges, painted with scars over every visible inch of her skin with hair that was dirty blonde and wild, different lengths sticking out over her head, the longest falling just below her shoulders. Everything about her screamed danger; the way she stood with her feet apart and her hands open at her sides, curled just a little inward like she was immediately ready for a fight. Her face was tilted slightly downward enough to make her hair cast a shadow over the hollows of her eyes, her mouth drawn up in a smile that peeled her lips up past her gums. A threat, more than anything. She was poised in a way that made her look like a predator, entirely confident in the fact she could beat each and every one of the people in front of her, despite looking like she’d recently lost a fight with a woodchipper.

“This,” Reyes said. “Is the Gauntlet. You’re going to be paired with another recruit under the supervision of an agent, and you’re going to spar with them.”

“The agent or the recruit?” the man beside Jesse asked. The woman at his other side knocked him with her elbow and hissed at him to be quiet.

Reyes raised an eyebrow. Ezra took a note on his datapad. The woodchipped lady smiled even wider.

“Both,” she replied.

For a moment, no one moved. Reyes shifted on his feet, arms crossed over his chest, and raised an eyebrow.

“The hell are you waiting for?”

All at once, the line moved, people surging for someone they knew and grouping up into pairs, hesitantly stumbling up the the first agent they saw, leaving Jesse standing alone among the other stragglers. Someone had already stepped onto both Mina and Montreal’s mats, so he scrambled for the free agent closest to him, instead. One he hadn’t met formally, but knew the face of. He, or so Jesse assumed, waved a hand at the white circle in the center of the mat, and Jesse moved to stand inside it. 

Another recruit awkwardly bumbled into the circle as well, rubbing the back of their neck. 

The agent handed them both a mouthguard and a roll of tape for their knuckles.

“Once you have your partner,” Reyes called. “You start. The round is over when someone taps out, or your supervisor says so.”

Jesse handed back the remnants of his tape and fit the mouthguard over his teeth, rolling his shoulders as he dropped into one of the fighting forms Mina’d taught him. Boxing, only because the recruit was going to go military. True to form, the recruit hesitantly took up their combat stance across from him, clenching and unclenching their knuckles. They cast a wary glance at the supervising agent, who raised a brow. 

“What are you looking at me for?” he chuckled. “Boss man gives orders, not me.”

And the orders were to start. 

Jesse lunged for his opponent, who squawked in alarm, snapping their arms up in front of their face to block him. He ducked underneath them and slammed his elbow into their gut, instead, throwing his weight into it and taking them both to the floor. The recruit recovered, then, taking advantage of the opening Jesse left when he sat up and reeled back his fist to throw a punch. They snapped hands around his wrists and rolled over, pinning Jesse to the ground, instead. He jammed his knee into their stomach, the same place as he’d thrown his elbow, making the recruit wheeze in pain and loosen their grip enough he could yank his arms back and roll onto his shoulders, planting his feet on their chest and hurling them off of him and out of the white ring.

As soon as he did, the supervisor started clapping, light and leisurely like he was watching a golf tournament. 

“You’re out of the ring. Excellent first round,” he sighed, moving to help up the recruit across the mat. As soon as they were upright, he turned to Jesse. “Now you get to try and beat me up. Winner spars first, I’m afraid. Hands up.” He shook out his arms and fluidly drifted to the opposite side of the ring. “I’m Robin, by the way.”

Jesse put up his fists. “Mccree,” he mumbled around the mouthguard. Tipped his head a little downward to imitate doing it with his hat. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Robin laughed, one hand over his mouth. 

“Flattery won’t save you, here,” he teased, and launched himself across the mat.

Jesse tried to move to the side and out of his path, but Robin pivoted on his heel and clapped a hand over Jesse’s ear, forcing an explosive snap of sound into his skull that made stars pop in his vision. Before he could recover, Robin’s hands were around either side of his face, digging into his jaw and gently twisting his head to the side.

“Crack,” he singsonged, dropping away as quickly as he’d come. “You lose. Up next, dear?”

Jesse stumbled over where the previous recruit was sitting, wide eyed and gaping in a mix of horror and awe. He dropped to the ground beside them and gently rubbed a hand over his neck.

“Holy shit,” they wheezed, standing. “Holy shit.”

He didn’t hear what happened next, too busy pondering the fact that he was dead. That was all it took. Less than ten seconds, and Robin would have killed him. Ended his entire life, right there, and Jesse would have been entirely powerless to stop him. 

But panicking about it wasn’t going to help. He had to stop before he started to spiral, get his stupid garbage brain to shut up before it flunked him out of his only chance at another life. Instead, he reran the fight over in his head, turning over each of his own motions in bullet time; there was a split second of hesitation when Robin charged him that kept him in range where he could have gotten away. Robin relied almost on that blinding speed and momentary shock to take him down. If Jesse hadn’t froze up, he could have avoided the hand to his ear, snatched Robin’s wrist out of the air and used that moment to wrench his arm upward and throw a punch below his ribs.

On the mat, the recruit stayed braced for the same lighting-fast onslaught that Robin had turned on Jesse moments before, bouncing on their toes and twitching. Robin did charge them, but this time, he feinted to the side just before the recruit’s fist passed through the air where his head had been, using the motion to drop to the ground, letting his feet slide out from under him and beneath his opponent, slamming his heels into the recruit’s ankles and toppling them, rolling out of the way the moment before they hit the ground and snatching the sides of their head the same as he did to Jesse, one knee braced in the center of their back. 

“Crack, you’re out,” he sang again, hardly out of breath. 

“Holy shit,” they heaved.

Robin laughed, pulling them to their feet. He passed them both bottles of water and activated a biotic emitter in the center of the ring, neatly settling down on the mat with his legs folded under him. He waved a hand in the air in Ezra’s direction, who marked something down on his holopad and waved back. 

“So. What now?” Jesse asked, rolling his water bottle between his palms. He scooted into the gold ring of the biotic emitter, letting the feeling of it wash over him.

“Now,” Robin said, pressing the bottoms of his feet together and leaning forward in a stretch. “We wait.”

True to his word, the three of them proceeded to sit in silence for about a minute more, watching the rounds unfold around them, until another supervisor raised their hand, and Robin stood up again, flagging them down. The other supervisor made a spinning motion with their finger, and shoved a recruit in their direction. Robin gently set a hand on Jesse’s shoulder and smiled. 

“Go on over there for your next match, alright?”

He did as he was told, carefully picking his way around the ongoing matches to the other mat. Same as before, he and the other recruit went up against one another, then individually against the supervisor. Same as before, he spent the time waiting for his next match analyzing the last, nitpicking over his actions to better his chances for the ones upcoming, carefully watching the way the agents fought comparatively to the military recruits. 

Over and over, he repeated the same routine, lost just as many fights as he won, if not more. Didn’t even come close to taking down the real Blackwatch agents, but from the looks it it, no one really did. By the time they released him and the others for lunch, he was drenched in sweat and buzzing from a mix of adrenaline and too much time under the biotic fields. He straggled at the back of the pack of recruits, feeling entirely out of place. They were big and he wasn’t, they looked like grown adults and he didn’t, they could probably walk and chew gum, and he was still working on it. Next to them, Jesse looked scrawny and pitiful.

When they got to the mess, the military recruits all shuffled to their own tables, packed together like nervous livestock, all used to being together while Jesse lingered by the doorway, unsure of where to go. Was it still okay to sit with Montreal when they were a supervisor? Was it still okay to sit with them at all? He was hanging around them for training, and he wasn’t training anymore, which made him wonder. Would he still be welcome?

He was considering hiding away in Angela’s lab when Defranco came up to him, tray of food in hand.

“Why are you over here?”

“Uh.” He decided to be honest. “I didn’t know if y’all wanted me around, anymore. I’m not looking for advice, so. Y’ain’t gotta put up with me, if you don’t want.”  
Defranco looked at him like he’d grown a seventh head.

“What the fuck? If we wanted you gone, you’d know. There’d be guns involved. Come eat some lunch, God.”

He felt the stares of the other recruits on his back as he walked over to his usual table and found himself greeted by a chorus of shouts and playful jabs from the agents around him, grinning and throwing thumbs-up in his direction. Some of the recruits threw him dirty looks across the room, muttering between one another. It was less anxiety inducing than he expected it to be, and instead left his insides feeling warm with a kind of smug pride, because even though they were bigger and stronger than he was, Jesse Mccree was the one sitting with Blackwatch, in earnest. 

Matches continued after lunch hour, lacking anything particularly exciting. By the end of the day, though, it was obvious who was at the top of the class: a massive, muscular military recruit named Moore, he towered over most everyone else in the entirety of Blackwatch, and was even more stacked than Reyes or the woman beside him, who Jesse assumed was some kind of superior, like Ezra. He was the first to beat a supervisor, and did so by snatching Mina out of the air mid-step and hurling her backwards hard enough to knock her into the next match. The thing that really pissed Jesse off, though? He didn’t care. Jesse was lucky enough not to have gone against him, yet, but he watched Moore’s matches when he could, and watched in disgust as he absolutely hammered the people he went up against. It was beyond fighting, in his case. It was brutality.

One of his matches was won by ‘killing blows’ like Robin had done to Jesse, where he stopped just before it got deadly. Moore knocked his opponent to the ground and froze with his foot less than an inch from their temple, his massive form hanging over them in a curb stomp the millisecond before impact. The supervisor almost killed him. Jesse saw it, but he didn’t know who else did; she reached behind her and had her hand on her knife, half-drawn, when he stopped. It wouldn’t have been enough to save the recruit, but enough to stop him, if Moore decided he wasn’t done. It left Jesse feeling like his guts were full of ice cubes. 

He crashed the second his head hit his pillow that night, and the second day of the Gauntlet began.

Unfortunately, it began with Jesse waking up in a cold sweat, nearly screaming, as was the norm. He groaned and rubbed at his eyes, rolling himself out of bed and into his clothes, stumbling his way down to the training room where the Gauntlet was being held. He had time, so he figured he’d jog a little to wake himself up before breakfast.

When he got there, though, he found he wasn’t the only one. Mina stood at the same mat she had the day before, throwing punches and kicking through the air, fighting an invisible opponent. She stopped when she saw Jesse, straightening up and wiping her brow with the back of her arm.

“What are you doing here so early?” she asked, once he’d come close enough.

“Woke up, figured I’d jog before I ate. Why’re you?”

“I’m thinking,” she said softly, absently rubbing at her wrist. Glancing down, he could see a light purple bruise on the skin there, wrapped in the pattern of a hand. She stared out at nothing in particular, her shoulders tense. 

“Mina?” he asked, gently bumping his fingers against her own.

She startled at the sound of her name, and looked up at him, wide-eyed. It melted into a smile a moment later, and he started to relax.

“I’m alright. Just thinking about the people I’m going to recommend.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“I’m not allowed to talk about it outside the other supervisors, Jesse.”

“Oh. My bad.”

She folded her arms and glanced to the door, then to one of the walls, sitting back on her heels.

“In my _opinion_ , though, you’re doing very well.”

Jesse grinned at her, and she smiled faintly in return. He’d been in the same place she had before, and in his experience, it didn’t help to dwell on what bothered him. His friends were usually the ones who got him out of it, and it helped more than he could express. The least he could do for Mina was to offer the same to her.

“Matches don’t start for another few hours, y’know. You eaten breakfast yet? I make a mean bowl of granola.”

-

Recruits looked good this year, in Gabriel’s opinion. He was up late, later than he should be, as Athena had graciously pointed out, but he wanted to be. He needed to look over the notes the supervising agents had left for him. Sokol and the other Stiffs picked out stationary agents, more than anything, as they always did. Field agents did the opposite and recommended recruits for the field, ones that had the specific spark in them that made for a Blackwatch agent in full, impossible to pin down but equally impossible to miss. Almost all of them suggested Mccree in some way, shape or form.

Petty as he was, Gabriel sent those clippings of the reports to Ana, despite the fact it was technically a break in his own rulebook. 

“You ready, Gabi?” Her voice came out tinny from the screen on the wall, but the exasperation in it was clear nonetheless. “Cameras rolling? Witnesses in earshot?” She inhaled, knocking her head against the wall and slouching forward on the exhale, glaring at him. “You’re right.”

He grinned.

“Get that dumb, smug look off your face. I’ll beat you up.”

“What smug look?” he asked, smugly. 

Ana groaned, dragging her hands over her face. 

“You’re awful. _Awful_.”

“You love me.”

“I know! It’s awful!”

He laughed, recrossing his ankles where they rested on his desk.

“Believe me now?”

“Ugh. Yeah, fine. You still want me to train him?”

“You still willing?”

“Obviously.” She hefted her rifle into her lap and field stripped it with quick, nearly-mechanical movements, rolling a cloth over the metal and scrubbing away at the little specks of dirt on the surface. “You need the best to train the best.” 

“And you’re the best I know,” Gabriel crooned, batting his eyelashes. 

She snorted and scratched her chin, starting to come in with patchy bits of dark hair.

“Shut it. You don’t have to schmooze me when I already said yes.”

“But Ana,” he gasped. “I just want you to know how grateful I am. You’re the best sniper out there, and I’m so blessed to have you as one of my dear friends, who I love very much. I love you soooo much, Ana. Did you know that?”

“Hey. Your mouth? Shut it the hell,” she barked, but there was a self-satisfied grin on her face nonetheless. “You’re babysitting Fareeha when I’m with your kid.”

“He’s not my kid. And Fareeha’s old enough to be in the gun range, anyway. For gods’ sake, Ana, you used to carry your rifle in the straps of her front carrier.”

“Irrellevant.”

“Besides, don’t you want her away from Blackwatch? My agents are a bunch of fucks.”

“They get it from you,” she snarked, starting to piece her rifle back together. “She wants to see her uncle Gabi, but if you’re busy--”

“I’ll take Fareeha,” he hurriedly assured her. She grinned at him from under her bangs, having played him yet again. Not that he minded all that much. He loved Fareeha. Privately, he was absolutely thrilled she took an interest in Overwatch, despite her mother’s disapproval.

“Pushover,” Ana teased. Gabriel stuck his tongue out at her. 

He glanced down at the red-lit clock on his desk and sighed. 

“Rounds start up again in about an hour. I’m gonna have to go, soon.”

Ana squinted at him, very deliberately loading her rifle.

“Gabi. How long have you been awake?”

“Bye, Ana,” he mumbled, ending the call. She was going to kill him for it when she got back, but for the time being, he had more pressing matters on his plate. He needed to be completely focused on the matches ahead.

The first rounds of the morning usually weren’t too interesting, with recruits still warming up and sleep-clumsy. Soares kept up a stream of crass remarks throughout, which Ezra politely laughed at, very occasionally murmuring one of his own that would startle both Soares and Gabriel into a bout of laughter, Gabriel trying to muffle his own and look dignified while Soares very nearly busted her stitches by cackling so hard, head tipped up to the ceiling and one hand on his bicep to steady herself.

He was watching one of the more promising military recruits, Maksimovic, as she fought Montreal when Soares bumped him in the side, grinning.

“Look at patito. He’s up against Mina.”

“Patito?”

“Mccree. Cause he follows you around like one.”

“And Mina? How come _you_ can call her that?” he grumbled, looking anyway. Sure enough, Mccree and Sokol were pacing careful circles around one another, fists raised.  
She shrugged. “Technically, I can’t. Her ears turn this cute pink color when I do, though.”

Gabriel lightly shoved her sideways. “Don’t tease her.”

Across the room, Mccree and Sokol engaged for real, throwing punches that either missed, or were effectively blocked. Evenly matched, from the looks of it, but Gabriel had his money on Sokol. She taught him, after all.

“Come on, jefe, I’m not teasing,” Soares insisted, leaning against his side. He shifted his weight to take on more of hers. She shouldn’t really be up and around, yet, but every few hours she was getting brief biotic treatments from one of the standby medics and she insisted she was fine. Probably hurting, though. “We both know it’s not going anywhere, y’know?”

Sokol lunged forward and struck Mccree just below the ribs, aimed upwards into his diaphragm. Gabriel and Soares both winced in sympathy. As Sokol moved forward to knock him out of the ring, though, Mccree snapped out a hand and got a fistful of her hair, launching himself forward and wrenching her head back, bringing the heel of his free hand to rest just in front of her nose. If he’d kept going with the movement, he would have very likely broken her nose and driven the bone into her head, killing her almost instantly. 

A win by ‘killing blow,’ the first he’d seen from Mccree. 

As soon as she conceded to the match, though, he let go of her, hovering close and speaking a mile a minute, probably asking if she was alright, making sure he hadn’t hurt her too badly. It was one of the many qualities she lauded him on in her reports to Gabriel-- Mccree could be vicious, but he could also be very kind. The difference between a violent, dangerous target and a Blackwatch agent was slim, but one of the largest differences was a sense of compassion. If someone could care, they were salvageable, in Gabriel’s opinion. Kid had a whole lot of heart.

Beside him, Soares breathed out a low whistle. “Impressive,” she mused. He nodded, and Ezra hummed in agreement at his other side, apparently having tuned into the fight to see it end. 

For another few hours, the fights were relatively calm, aside from watching another recruit, Kaufman, manage to beat Robin. Recruits besting the supervisors was becoming increasingly common with every spar, though it remained an irregular occurrence. Kaufman looked like she might be good for the same kind of work Robin did; an assassin or, with some insight into her skills, see if she was good as a undercover agent. Robin excelled in honeypot missions, and it seemed he was entirely taken by Kaufman already, waiting with bated breath for the other skill tests that came after the Gauntlet to sort the brand-new agents into more specialized areas. 

Kaufman was a given; she’d been given plenty of recommendations to get in. Gabriel thought she would be good for Blackwatch, himself.

He was watching her duke it out with another recruit when Soares cringed against his arm.

“You alright? Need to sit down? Biotics?” 

“Not that,” she snorted, knocking him with her elbow. “Just wondering how attached you are to the cowboy.”

“Why do you ask?”

Soares jerked her chin in the direction of Montreal’s mat, where Mccree and Moore stood across from each other, stretching out before they fought.

“Shit.”

“Kid that doesn’t know when to back down and a fucker who doesn’t know when to step off. What could go wrong?” She wasn’t smiling, though.

It was a good point; both Mccree and Moore had issues with calling it quits, albeit in different ways. Moore struggled when it came to knowing how much was too much, and Mccree had the same issue when it came to admitting defeat. He wouldn’t concede until he physically couldn’t, and Moore wouldn’t stop until he won. Those two up against each other promised some action for the medical team, at the very least. 

The fight started like the rest of Moore’s had, with him charging forward to take his opponent down fast, but Mccree ducked out of the way, dropping to the floor and rolling rather than staying upright as most of Moore’s opponents had. It made the sideways hook he always threw after his charge hit empty air, with Mccree now on his other side, weaving in and out of his space and dropping punches wherever he could. Not that it did much against Moore’s bulk-- if Gabriel hadn’t sparred with Reinhardt before, he might have had difficulties, too-- but it was more than most of his previous opponents had managed. 

Mccree’s lead didn’t last long beyond that, though. Moore clipped his shoulder with a massive fist and knocked him off balance, then proceeded to use that opening to get him in a headlock, choking off his air supply until he either tapped out or Montreal called the match. Only problem was Mccree wasn’t going to tap out, and Montreal was only going to call the match once he was about to pass out. Gabriel was actually considering stopping it himself, watching the kid thrash against Moore’s arm, going so far to reach up and claw at his face, determined and angry. 

Around them, people were pausing in between their own matches to watch the fight go down. It was no secret that Moore topped his class, and anyone who lasted more than twenty seconds in the ring with him started to gather an audience. Either to see them beat Moore, or to watch them get trounced by him.

As soon as Gabriel took a step forward to stop the fight before it really hurt someone, Mccree proceeded to open his mouth, spit out his mouthguard, and bite down on Moore’s arm, hard.

Soares whooped and clapped her hands together, coughing out her raspy laughter.

Moore did let go, and Mccree was gone in an instant, chest visibly heaving. 

“What the fuck?” Moore squawked, and Mccree took the opportunity to charge him. Moore looked entirely stunned that he would even try-- so was Gabriel, to be honest, considering the easy 150 pounds Moore had on him-- and missed his next punch because of it, Mccree diving to the mat and out of the way, rolling sideways and snatching one of Moore’s ankles, yanking it out from under him and dropping him to the ground, delicate as a commercial jet from 30,000 feet.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Robin gasp, pointing and bouncing on his heels. He’d used the same move when he was supervising Mccree, if Gabriel remembered correctly.  
True to Robin’s move, Mccree leapt upright just as fast, reaching for the back of Moore’s head to twist his neck.

Before he got ahold of him, though, Moore threw back his elbow and cracked it squarely into Mccree’s face, who toppled backward, instinctively curling inward. As soon as Moore got up, Mccree was doing his best to scrabble back upright, himself, scooting back to get more distance between them. He stood up, a little shaky, and charged Moore head-on again. Moore swung to the side, anticipating another feint, but Mccree kept going, wrapping his arms around Moore’s trunk-like middle and throwing all of his weight into him, sending him stumbling backward, just barely maintaining his balance. Less than an inch from the edge of the ring.

He grabbed Mccree by the back of his shirt and ripped him off, making him sprawl across the mat, coughing. Before he could get back upright, Moore fisted both hands in the front of Mccree’s shirt and hurled him, like a ragdoll, across the mat. Mccree landed at the edge of the match two mats over, very narrowly avoiding crashing into another recruit who leapt out of the way when they saw him coming. 

The supervisor of the mat, Dennel, crouched down next to Mccree and helped him blearily sit up as Moore punched a fist in the air, victorious. The room exhaled a collective, disappointed breath, Gabriel included. Mccree’d come closer than anyone before him, but it still wasn’t quite enough. 

Dennel and Montreal half dragged him over to the waiting medics, who dragged him into a chair the second they got their hands on him, biotics already up and running.  
They’d probably insist he stay benched for the rest of the day, and Gabriel made the executive decision to second that thought, watching Mccree press a wad of gauze to his bleeding face.

Gabriel was definitely going to check on him later, but for the moment, he needed to handle the issue of imbalanced numbers. 

“Moore,” he barked, silencing the room, every head swinging over to rubberneck at whatever Gabriel was going to say next. Moore stopped rubbing his forearm and looked up. “I’ve seen enough of your skills, for today. You and Mccree are both benched until tomorrow.”

From the medics’ corner, Mccree tried to stand up, only to be shoved back down by the doctors attending. 

Gabriel didn’t get a chance to talk to him, after all; the moment he released the recruits for the day, Nakano and Defranco were there, along with Montreal, Sokol, Robin, and a handful of others who delivered loud congratulations and walked him down to dinner, laughing. Gabriel would have worried more, had he not seen the wink and toothy grin Mccree shot at Moore as he passed, the latter standing alone and entirely without praise as he had since his matches ended.

The medics were good at what they did, but the next day, Mccree still showed up with a newly-busted lip, a black eye, and a nasty cut over his brow-- thankfully not the one his optics were on-- with the barest hint of a limp and a heavy rasp to his voice. Gabriel made him sit out for the rest of day three, too. It ended about two hours before lunch, anyway, so he didn’t miss all that much. Besides, the new agents were almost all picked out already. 

Gabriel flagged the supervisors to cut off the matches when the time came, and he waited while the last of the recruits finished up, all looking around at the agents and each other for some sign of what was going on.

“Line up,” he barked. The Blackwatch agents immediately took stance at his sides, some still sweating and breathing hard. The recruits hesitantly lined up across from him as Ezra handed him a holopad listing off the names and groupings that had been decided on.

“Congratulations on completing the Gauntlet, all of you. I’m sorting you into three groups, based on the reviews of your performances. Group one is Hanna, Ariosto, Miller, Cotton, Fontaine, and Dietrich. Group two is Kaufman, Mccree, Idowu and Maksimovic. Rest of you are in group three.”

For a moment, all the recruits held their breath, stiff as boards. 

“Group one. Blackwatch could use your drive. You’re talented, all of you. If you want it, there’s a place for you among our stationary ranks.” The new agents in question all billowed out a collective sigh, some looking more downcast than others, who were bouncing on their heels and punching excitedly through the air. Gabriel cracked a grin, and looked down at the holopad again. 

“Group two. You’ve got a spark in each of you, one you don’t see every day. We want you in Blackwatch. You’re welcome in either the field program or stationary. The choice is yours.”

Group two was always his favorite part. He watched as slowly, the information fully processed through each of their heads, Mccree’s jaw dropping open and Maksimovic dropping to the ground right where she stood, clapping hands over her face and laughing breathlessly. Idowu actually shouted in delight, jumping up and down and shaking Kaufman’s shoulders with wild glee.

“Group three.” The last of them straightened, some already swearing and sighing in disappointment, having figured out what group they were in. “Your dedication and drive are appreciated, but we don’t think Blackwatch is the program for you. Thank you for your time, energy, and consideration. You’re dismissed.”  
Slowly, group three filtered out in varying states of dismay, Moore staring down at the ground between his feet with his hands half lifted, brow furrowed. Maybe he’d learn something. 

As soon as group three was gone completely, Gabriel looked to the new agents, who were some combination of bouncing in excitement or still sitting on the floor. For a moment, he stayed completely silent, staring each of them down and watching as they became increasingly shifty under his gaze. He couldn’t help the smile that crept up his face, though, despite how hard he tried to fight it. Finally, he opened up his arms and smiled at them for real, feeling the agents at his sides start to get antsy. After this, they’d party for hours, knocking back painful amounts of alcohol and sugary foods, getting little to no sleep at all, and being absolute menaces to the newbies, who would show up to training the next day feeling like steaming piles of shit.

It was the best.

“Welcome to Blackwatch!” he bellowed, and as soon as the words left his lips, his own agents surged forward, engulfing their new comrades in a chorus of cheers and congratulations. At his sides, Ezra and Soares cheered as well, Ezra’s tame clapping and soft praises completely opposite Soares’ screaming in wordless glee, shouting into the crowd like to pained her to be apart from it.

Fuck, Gabriel loved this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not even joking lads i cannot express how much all yr messages meant to me they lit up my whole gotdam day and then some youre absolute angels  
> comin down from he fuckin heavens, takin my hand n like fuckin.. delivering to my gay ass the tender loving words of fucken valhalla... youre so sweet im crying
> 
> also patito=duckling


	18. 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HHHHHHNNG THAT WAS A LONGER PAUSE BETWEEN UPDATES THAN I PLANNED FOR, MY BAD
> 
> ITS ALSO P SHORT, SO UH .MY BAD 
> 
> ILL AADMIT THIS CHAP PROLLY ISNT MY BEST BUT ITS BEEN A WHILE AND I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET AN UPDATE OUT  
> THANK YALL FOR BEING PATIENT
> 
> AS PROMISED, AN AMARI APPEARS

Gabriel woke up with cold sweat on his skin and the smell of lavender in his room. He’d been dreaming about the Crisis, as always, with little bits of modern flavor tossed in-- a Blackwatch agent here, an imprisoned terrorist there, extra gallons of blood on his hands that both had and hadn’t happened. It wasn’t unusual. What was unusual, though, was the smells that guided him through it; out of place and unfit for the settings his head spun around him, pulling at his senses like an itch at the back of his skull. 

It woke him up, yanked him out of his dreams before they turned too ugly, bumping up against his cheeks in clouds of wood, smoke, and gunpowder, all tangled with lavender oil strong enough to dampen the rest. Smoke, but that might have been the wrong word for it; it was more like the unique odor produced by the coiled-up heating element when you turned on an old stovetop in the winter. Gunpowder wasn’t as concerning as it really should have been, seeing as most everyone in this business always had it clinging to their skin. The wood was faintest, just barely-there under the purple flowers that used to be in front of his house, used to attract packs of fat honeybees that hummed around the front step, hardly even enough to tell it was there at all. 

Altogether, the aroma was something silky and rough at once, pleasantly burning and warm at the back of his throat like hot wood in a sauna or Soares’ cheap cigars. Familiar in a way he’d never forget, not after everything it meant to him.

“Ana?”

“What’s up, sleeping beauty?” 

He sat up as she spoke, rubbing his eyes. When he pulled his hands away, he saw her standing in the bathroom, carefully shaving away the scruff that had grown in on her chin. Her hair was knotted on top of her head and wet, but there was no steam on the mirror. The sea breeze had blown it all away, probably. 

“When did you get here?” Gabriel asked. 

Not that he wasn’t happy to see her-- he was absolutely elated to have her around, as always. Being around her made him feel whole in a way that didn’t come easy anywhere else. The closest was when he was on missions with his senior agents, all bantering back and forth into the night, sprawled over one another across a safehouse they knew like the backs of their hands. It felt like being back with his team during the Crisis. You spend so long with someone, you forget how to be apart. He knew his codependency on them was definitely the result of years of trauma, but they were all a little clingy with each other, and they were alright with that. 

She shrugged. “About an hour or so ago.”

“Where’s Fareeha?”

“Sleeping.”

Gabriel swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stumbled back upright, pulling open his dresser and fishing out a set of fresh clothes. He’d been waiting for a chance to talk to her face-to-face again, but now that he had it, he didn’t know what to say. Not that it mattered, really. A lot of their relationship was spent in companionable silence, anyway. 

“Mind if I shower?”

Ana snorted. “It’s your room, Gabi.”

“Yeah, and that’s my shaving cream, but that didn’t seem to stop you,” he snarked back, elbowing her in the arm as he squeezed past. Thankfully, she was using her own razor this time.  
“I do what I want.”

She glanced sideways at him as she spoke, throwing a wry grin that faded into muted concern upon seeing his disheveled, sweaty state. 

“Hey. You alright?”

“I’m fine,” he assured her, running a hand through his curls, getting just long enough to be a little unruly. He needed to cut it. “Nightmares. You get it.” 

Ana nodded, turned back to her reflection. “Yeah. Sorry I didn’t wake you up, then.”

“Don’t worry about it. Pretty sure you woke me up anyway. I don’t know many people who smell like that much lavender oil.”

“Shut up, it’s great. Glad I could help with my stink, though.”

“Mm-hmm.” 

Gabriel peeled off his shirt and dropped it on the floor, followed by his sweats and underwear. From the corner of his eye he saw Ana wrinkle her nose.

“Ugh, speaking of stink.”

“I’m _working_ on it.”

“Big stink.”

“You’re a big stink.”

He fiddled with the tap for a few moments before clamoring into the shower, pulling the glass door shut behind him. The water was still chilly, but warming up. He couldn’t turn it up much, anyway, or Ana would probably steal his clothes for steaming up the mirror. She stood at the sink, carefully scraped away the last of the hair on her chin and splashed her face, toweling off and inspecting her work. Impeccable, as usual. She had an eye for appearances Gabriel couldn’t match, try as he might. He could read people like open books based on the way they walked, presented, dressed, smiled, and breathed, sure, but he couldn’t manage a clean shave if his life depended on it. Thus, he usually asked Ana to do his hair when he needed it. 

“Hey, can you cut this, later?” He scrubbed his fingers through soapy brown locks, long enough to begin curling into ringlets at the ends and very narrowly avoiding getting a drop of shampoo in his eye.

“Aww, what?” She looked over at him, pouting. “But it looks good when it’s like this.”

“It’s a pain.”

“Only because you don’t know how to take care of it.”

He stuck his tongue out at her, but tugged at one of the curls sticking to his forehead, considering. It did look pretty good. Maybe he’d keep it for just a little while, see how he felt about it in a week or two.  
Speaking of, did he go over his schedule for next week? Was he supposed to deploy, or did the roster change? He needed to send Upstairs the progress reports on the newbies by Wednesday, and he wanted them out for their first stint in the field by the twenty-sixth. Reports were a pain. He needed to try and find some bullshit to spout off at Upstairs so they’d leave him alone. 

Kaufman was going to need a longer span of training due to the extra work she was doing with Robin, but Gabriel could talk about her proficiency in infiltration. Leave it vaguely-specific enough that Upstairs would take it and go. Idowu was getting better and better sim scores since he got paired with Alvarado, but sims weren’t the real thing. Good enough for the bureaucrats, though. Maksimovich was easy enough; she was shaping up to be a good frontrunning tank like Reinhart-- nowhere near as big, but no one was-- clever and quick to make decisions. 

Mccree was going to be the most difficult. Not because he wasn’t doing well-- he was excelling along with his classmates-- but because Gabriel pulled so many strings for him already. Having Ana teach him had got him a lot of heat, but he knew the results would be more than worth it. Mccree had a lot of promise, and Ana was the best. 

“When did you want to start working with Mccree?” Gabriel mused aloud, rinsing off the last suds stuck to his skin. “Also, you stole my towel.” Ana wasn’t in the bathroom, anymore, but he knew she’d still be able to hear him. Sure enough, she stuck her head through the doorway a moment later and shrugged, hurling a fresh towel at him as he stepped out of the shower. 

“Dunno. Whenever, I guess,” she said. “I can start tomorrow.”

“Do you want to?”

“Sure. You already gave your big ‘rules of Blackwatch’ speech?”

“Yeah, a few hours before you landed.”

“How was that?”

“Maksimovich looked about ready to kill me for the styrofoam ball thing.”

Ana snickered, sitting up on the vanity and poking his bare shoulder with her foot.

“It’s a good one.”

They remained in silence for a minute or two while Gabriel dried off and pulled clean clothes back on.

“So what do you want me to start him with?” she asked.

“Whatever you want to? He’s still doing general training with the others, so you don’t have to worry about the little stuff like that.” He bundled up his dirty clothes in the towel and walked out of the stuffy bathroom, Ana trailing after him. “He’s used a gun before, but I don’t know if he really knew how to do it properly. Good aim, from what I’ve seen. That’s what I was really hoping you could help him with, if you’re up for it.”

“No, Gabi. I am a sniper, so I intend on teaching this boy how to fly no less than seven kinds of aircraft. Maybe Irish line dancing, while I’m at it.”

He swatted the bun on her head, making the whole thing come unraveled and sending clumps of still-damp hair tumbling into her eyes. She kicked at the backs of his legs in retaliation, to no avail. 

“But yeah,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Thanks.”

He dumped the dirty clothes and his towel into the laundry hamper and returned to his bed, yanking off the sheets and tossing those in, too. Ana helped him put on the new ones, taking the corner across from him and tucking it under the mattress without his asking her to. She flapped out his comforter overtop them as he picked his pillows up off the floor. As soon as the bed was made, Ana flopped across it, immediately ruining the work she’d just put in to make the blanket lay flat. Gabriel picked his holopad up off his nightstand and sat down beside her, quietly scrolling through his emails for anything important. As he did, she grabbed at his leg and wiggled around the blanket until she could pillow her head on his thigh, closing her eyes and sighing. With his free hand, Gabriel lightly tugged at her hair.

“Don’t fall asleep. You’ll fuck up your sleep schedule.”

“I’m not sleeping,” Ana grunted. “I’m just… taking five.”

“Uh-huh. Fareeha just ‘taking five,’ too?”

“No, she’s dead to the world.” She pinched the inside of his leg, using her other hand to swat his away from her hair, drying frizzy. “If you’re so worried about her, you wake her up.”

“You know, waking up a twelve-year-old after a seventeen hour flight doesn’t seem like a great idea.”

“Exactly.”

“No, I mean for me. You’re her mom, you have to. I’m just the cool uncle.”

“You’re the whiny uncle. Because you’re a whiner.”

Gabriel gasped in mock offense, grinning. 

“The audacity.”

Ana chuckled, lightly punching him in the knee.

She did, in fact, fall asleep on his leg, and was now drooling on his sweats and snoring quietly. He didn’t feel like waking her up, so he opened up a book on his holopad, instead, idly chatting with Athena in the client as he read about an ex-marine trying to solve some national conspiracy. It wasn’t a particularly thrilling piece of literature, but that was fine. He liked the peacefulness that hovered in the room, liked the distant crash of waves against the cliffs in time with Ana’s rhythmic breathing. 

Athena told him about a family of birds she’d found with one of the perimeter cameras; nothing particularly exotic, and not barn owls, as she’d regretfully informed him, but a little nest of doves tucked up into one of the trees. She showed him the video feed where, currently, one of the parents was tending to a gaggle of chicks while the other was finding something to eat. Athena liked the wildlife. If he dug deep enough in her databases, he would find a folder labeled only as ‘pretty,’ filled with photos of animals she saw or particularly nice sunsets, clouds in the sky that looked like other, miscellaneous things. He used one she’d taken of an owl as his screensaver. 

She went on to tell him about the little happenings on and around the base, insignificant things that didn’t need to be shared but she did anyway, because she liked to. Athena got lonely, sometimes, Gabriel knew, so he did his best to let her share things with him when the two of them had time. But between the sea, his book, Athena’s stories, and Ana’s quiet snoring, he started to find himself dozing off, too. He felt guilty for cutting Athena off, but she assured him she didn’t mind at all, and left him to his evening. Eventually, he shifted back to rest more comfortably against his pillows and dragged Ana into a less awkward position-- she slept like a rock, same as her daughter-- so she’d wake up with less of a crick in her neck, and he fell into an easy, warm, and dreamless sleep.

 

\-------

 

Meanwhile, Jesse paced back and forth across his room, sitting down when he tried to relax and immediately getting back up again, walking the same patch of carpet over and over, staring at nothing in particular as he tried to process the morning before. It was dark outside, now, and his clock read 02:09, slowly ticking on as it had since he got back before lunch. 

He was having a hard time. 

The morning had started simple; he’d gone down to the training room the same as he had for the last four days, save for the two he followed Mina around her day to learn more about her work. That was mandatory, and all four of them had done it, paired up with a stationary and learned what made them so deeply respected by everyone else. 

Jesse’d gone with Mina and watched people part for her like water, offering help in any way they could, holding doors, smiling at her, even saluting her, in one case. It wasn’t like she had any rank, either-- the only command system was Ezra and Reyes, with everyone else being equals. It was a neat idea to Jesse, who’d only ever known careful hierarchies and pecking orders never to be tested unless he felt like getting shot, stabbed, or otherwise.

Reyes made it very clear, though, that stationaries, or Stiffs, as most of Blackwatch called them (Mina assured him it was a title of respect), deserved to be lauded and respected, with no exceptions. It was definitely deserved, in Jesse’s opinion, between the work they did every day and the politics they had to put up with. Reyes said the greatest degree of respect came from the fact that they existed in a way the rest of Blackwatch just… didn’t. Field agents were shadows, barely documented and in the rare cases they were, redacted to hell and left behind dozens of firewalls. Becoming a field agent effectively wiped you off the face of the earth, nothing more than a thought. Vanished from thin air. Not that Jesse had to worry much about that, as he’d been almost nonexistent in the first place. 

Stiffs, on the other hand, were linked directly to Blackwatch, and Blackwatch had a long list of enemies. You respected stationaries, Reyes had said, because every second of the day, their asses were on the line for you.

That, Jesse could understand.

Reyes’ speech this morning, though, he was still trying to get ahold of. 

After the four of them-- Kaufman, Maksimovich, Idowu, and Jesse-- finished morning warmups, Reyes had told them to sit down and listen up while he went over Blackwatch’s three biggest rules. Four, if they counted respecting stationaries, ‘but whatever.’ 

The first was easy: follow the chain of command. Reyes was in charge, and if he wasn’t there, then it was the lieutenant of the base, or the agent assigned point on a mission. Gibraltar’s lieutenant was Ezra. Superiors were where they were ‘because they know more than you,’ Reyes’d said, and following their orders would make for better chances at staying alive. 

Rule number two was when it got...complicated. 

Reyes had asked all of them, ‘when I tell you to jump, what do you do?’ to which the answer was ‘jump,’ obviously. Only, it wasn’t. 

_Wrong,_ Reyes barked, _when I tell you to jump, you look down._

Which didn’t make any sense, because they were supposed to follow the chain of command. Maksimovich had said so, and Reyes proceeded to push a gun into her hands and tell her to shoot him. As in, he just ordered one of his agents to shoot her commander dead in the chest. She refused, of course; flipped on the safety and dropped the gun to the floor instead while the rest of them looked on in horror. But instead of being punished for it, Reyes congratulated her on her actions (and proved the gun shot only styrofoam, when they all failed to relax). He said he wanted them to follow orders, but to think about them, before they did. If it was a shitty command, ignore it. 

And that didn’t make sense. Jesse knew he was supposed to follow orders, because failing to do so would get him into a less than ideal situation. He never got the privilege of thinking before he did something. That was for people above him, people with choices and options and outs, but not him. In theory, being able to think for himself was great, but in practice he just couldn’t wrap his head around it.

And it only got worse. Rule number three, Reyes said, was that the safety of noncombatants came before anything else, and that their own safety was secondary. Now that on its own was fine, but the rule was more than that. When Reyes said their safety was secondary to noncombatants, he meant secondary only to noncombatants. Mission completion didn’t even play a role, because that came after the health of the agents involved. 

_It’s not a success unless everyone comes home._

He made them say it over and over, out loud, looked each of them dead in the eyes as they did, leaving no room for misinterpretation. 

Like rule number two, Jesse just. Couldn’t understand it. He got it as a concept, sure, he understood the words on their own, but strung together-- more accurately, strung together and applied to himself-- they stopped making sense at all. Because it implied he had value. And not only did he have it, but that value was greater than that of completing an objective. He understood other agents having that value, even; but when it came to him, he simply couldn’t conceive it. He wasn’t anybody. How could he possibly be worth more than the mission, itself? 

Jesse dropped onto his bed again, curling up his knees to his chest and resting his chin on his knees. He idly picked at the acne on his face while he tried to go over all Reyes’ words again, again for the umpteenth time, but he still felt like there had to be something he missed. Some exception, some loophole where he had to fall. 

He dozed off, eventually, when he sat down for too long and Angela’s sleep aid kicked in, still pondering over the same phrase over and over, still failing to put it in some shape he could understand. 

It’s not a success unless everyone comes home.


	19. 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hhhjdnkskjfjhf sorry again for such a long wait between chapters ive been Big Depression
> 
> this ones pretty short n its not my best again m real sorry ill do my best to shape it up w the next few me bad
> 
>  
> 
> if any of yall have some suggestions 4 future chapters before The Genji Chapter or things i can improve on let me kno !!

Jesse was fucking fantastic at his job. His job was to shoot things and stay alive, and he was good at it, great at it, even. He was a prodigy. He’d gotten this far on spite, stubbornness, and paranoia alone, and he wasn’t about to stop now. He could do this. He would do this. He’d stop feeling so meaningless, and he’d find his place somewhere, make a name and make a difference and make a change; Jesse Mccree would be something good. He’d be a hero, for once. And then he’d go home.

But first, he proceeded to wake up and wish he was dead.

-

“Commander, Captain Amari has a message for you.”

“If it’s another meme, I don’t care.”

“She insists this is important.”

Gabriel sighed, setting aside the papers he was working on and grabbing his holopad off his desk, entering in his security code and opening up the communications client. Below a string of poorly-edited photos Ana’d taken in the last few days was a plain message in text, neither preceding nor following some kind of punchline.

**AMARI** : hey gabi  
**AMARI** : gabi  
**AMARI** : gabe im serious this time its not a meme i promise  
**AMARI** : is mccree training with someone else today or

Gabriel frowned. Mccree’d been training with Ana every other afternoon since he’d started running official drills with the other recruits, and thusfar Ana said he’d never missed. Never even been late. Judging by the time on his clock, Ana probably showed up at the training room more than ten minutes ago, and she said Mccree was almost always there before she arrived, anyway.

**REYES** : No  
**REYES** : Why  
**AMARI** : thanks for responding finally  
**AMARI** : hes not here  
**AMARI** : and i wouldnt worry abt it but hes always here  
**AMARI** : like all the fucken time actually  
**AMARI** : part of me wonders if he lives in this training room  
**AMARI** : smells like it  
**AMARI** : heyo  
**REYES** : Ana focus please  
**AMARI** : ya ok my question is do you kno where hes at  
**REYES** : No  
**REYES** : So far as i know he would be with you  
**AMARI** : u think hes hungover or somthing  
**AMARI** : if he is pls tell me so i can find deets and embarrassing drunk photos  
**REYES** : I mean  
**REYES** : I can check  
**AMARI** : ok cool do that

The conversation halted for a moment while Gabriel chewed on his lip, thinking. Ezra would be up by now, and he didn’t want to bother him if he was working, anyway, so he couldn’t ask him to check. Beside him, the holopad chimed.

**AMARI** : actually tho please go look for him im worried

He might as well. 

If he was being completely honest with himself, he was a little concerned, too. Mccree didn’t just half-ass things, at least not so far as Gabriel’d seen. Suddenly, all the medical concerns Mercy’d brought up offhandedly in the past started to itch at the back of his mind, winding him up into a greater stress than was really necessary. It didn’t help the last time this had happened, he’d found one of his field agents passed out and nearly bleeding to death because they’d accidentally taken a bloodthinner and fell down the stairs. Blackwatch agents were still people, and being people meant they fucked up sometimes. Unfortunately, their fuck ups were usually of the deadlier variety, which was Gabriel’s least favorite kind.

Mercy’d been saying something about Mccree’s body weight fluctuating even after his diet had stabilized; how he failed to maintain a regular BMI, how his vitamin and hormone levels kept swinging, how his body seemed to strain a little more than what should be normal. She’d said it was only her erring to the side of caution, saying that it was most likely nothing at all and he was just taking awhile to fall into a routine, coupled with the fact he wasn’t quite finished growing, yet. 

He’d be more comforted by the assessment if she hadn’t also included ‘possibly experiencing respiratory issues; will test in the future’ at the bottom. She’d waved that off as well, blaming it on the fact that Mccree apparently had a history of smoking, which surprised Gabriel less than it probably should have. 

He’d taken her advice and decided not to worry about Mercy’s report, though. 

Until now, at which point he was nervously making his way down to the barracks, biting a hole in his cheek and walking a bit too quickly to be considered unconcerned. He really, really, really did not want to find a dead kid who could have been saved if Gabriel’d been just a little faster, or a little more observant, or just a little better at anything, everything. He’d seen far too many already. 

By the time he came to Mccree’s door, he was almost jogging, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth and twitching with built-up anxiety, feeling the same as he did when he lost his sisters once in Costco.

“Mccree?” he called, rapping his knuckles against the door.

Nothing.

“He is inside, according to my logs,” Athena murmured, failing to make Gabriel feel any better.

He knocked on the door again, louder this time.

“Kid? Get out here, Ana’s waiting for you.”

This time, he got a response, muffled and distant.

“No.”

...No? 

“The hell do you mean, ‘no?’”

Again, the response was faraway and nearly unintelligible, but this time it sounded stuffy, like Mccree had a cold.

“Not today. Just leave me the hell alone.”

His voice broke at the end, splintered and wavering. Like he was crying.

Gabriel sighed. “Come on, kid. She was worried about you, I just wanted to make sure you’re alright.”

This time, there was no voice that followed. No footsteps, either. No rustling or shifting, no nothing. The silence did nothing to settle Gabriel’s nerves. 

“Mccree?”

Still, he was met with only silence. Maybe Ana would be able to coax him out, or Mercy. See if he could find Nakano and Defranco, or convince Sokol to come by. He’d very nearly turned to walk away when he heard the unmistable shattering of glass. 

“Shit, Mccree? Kid?” No answer. “I’m coming in. Athena--”

The door slid open before he could even ask, letting Gabriel step into the room and over the laundry on the floor. Nothing excessive; just a few shirts and towels mostly piled up in one corner, falling a little out of the basket. The sheets were stripped off the bed and heaped haphazardly in front of the closet, like they’d been thrown there, but the room was otherwise unassuming. The window was open, but undamaged.  
The door to the bathroom was shut, but the light shone out from underneath it, standing out odd and artificial against the otherwise sunlit carpet. Gabriel knocked, feeling bile in his throat.

“Mccree? You okay?”

Still, there was nothing, and he felt the blood in his veins start to itch under his skin. What if he was already dead? What if Gabriel’d been too late? What if he was dying on the tile, his life in peril because Gabriel was too slow and oblivious and stupid to realize something was wrong sooner?

“I’m opening the door, okay?”

The knob turned easy and he shoved his shoulder into the wood, a little harder than necessary. Instead of being met with his reflection in the mirror, though, he was greeted by a dozen jagged versions of his face, spiderwebbed and kaleidoscopic like a cubist painting. The center of the mirror had clearly been punched, a little smudge of blood sticking to the glass and a drop, still liquid, sitting on the ceramic of the sink.

Mccree was curled up with his knees against his chest between the sink and the toilet, hugging his shins and staring at the floor, his face puffy and tear-streaked. He didn’t look up when Gabriel entered the room, nor did he make any move to respond to the noise, other than to curl closer into his legs and wince. One of his hands was dripping blood onto the floor, split over the knuckles and oozing a dark spot into his shirt where it pressed against his chest. 

Immediately, Gabriel dug the first aid kit out of the sink cabinet and crouched in front of him, hesitantly reaching for Mccree’s wrist to pull it closer. Mccree made no move to recoil, so Gabriel settled crosslegged on the floor and started to clean out the little cuts on his hand, carefully picking over the wound for any bits of glass that got stuck there, waiting to see if he’d speak. A moment later, Mccree piped up. 

“I’ll pay for a new one,” he rasped, slurred and muffled behind his arm. 

“What?”

“The mirror. Sorry I broke it. I’ll pay for a new one.”

Gabriel plucked a piece of said mirror out from between one of Mccree’s fingers, making his hand twitch.

“Jesus kid. I don’t give a shit that you broke the mirror. I just want to know why. What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Mccree shook his head, curling further into his middle.

“I just. Needed to hit somethin’, I guess.”

“Why?”

He wrinkled his nose in a snarl this time, digging his fingernails into his leg.

“‘Cause fuckin’-- just fuckin’ because! ‘Cause I was pissed!”

“What about?”

Mccree fell silent. Gabriel almost thought he was just ignoring him, until he saw the tears welling up in his eyes. He gasped a shaky inhale and they fell, pooling in the crook of his elbow where he hid his face.  
“I started bleeding again.”

At once, the frantic anxiety in Gabriel’s chest returned in full force, making him pull the bandages over Mccree’s knuckles a little harder than he intended, feeling him flinch away from the contact. He’d apologize for it later, but the more pressing issue remained.

“Bleeding? Where, what’s wrong?”

Mccree yanked his arm away, rolling his hand into a fist and shaking, angry. He dug his hands into his hair and pulled, turning the white wrappings pink and snarling without any words. 

“Not-- not like that! Like fuckin’... fuckin’ _month_ bleeding. Period bleeding.”

Oh thank God.

Gabriel billowed out a sigh of relief, breaking into a loose chuckle. PMS was fine. That was totally fine. That could be at least helped by some regulating medications, if it made Mccree this upset. It was fixable, though. Completely treatable and completely not-deadly, which was Gabriel’s favorite kind of medical crisis.

“Oh, that’s good. Fuck, kid, you scared the shit out of me. I thought you were dying, or something.”

Mccree stared at him, jaw dropped open and brows pinched together, still sinking his nails into his arms. 

“I mean, I know it sucks,” Gabriel continued. “But that means you’re getting proper nutrition, at least. You’re healthy.”

“What?”

He looked back at Mccree, who continued to gape, mouth moving wordlessly like he couldn’t even think of speaking at all. 

“That’s not-- I ain’t supposed to fuckin’. I’m not. It’s been _years_. I didn’t think it would just _come back_.”

“Years? What do you mean, years? I don’t--”

Oh. Ohh. Ohh. The beard, the excess acne, the weight, the hormone imbalance. Fuck, he was a dumbass.

“You were on T.” 

Mccree threw his arms up into the air.

“Yeah, I was on T! That’s why I’m fuckin’ pissed! I didn’t think this horseshit would just _come back_.”

Gabriel smacked a hand against his forehead. Of course he was. He was stupid not to have figured it out before. But if Mccree was on T at seventeen, then he probably wasn’t post-op for top surgery, either, which meant.

“You’re not post-op, right?” he asked, patting his own chest.

“No,” Mccree spat bitterly.

“Have you been wearing compression clothes during training?”

“I mean. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I just layer up with sports bras, y’know, ‘cause--”

Gabriel heaved another sigh. “Come, on, kid! You know you shouldn’t do that shit! For fuck’s sake, Mercy was gonna test you for asthma or something!” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “When was the last time you had a treatment?”

Mccree shrugged. “Dunno. A week before you dragged me out here, maybe?” Then, quieter. “Sorry for bein’ such a pain.”

“You’re not a pain, kid.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Oh, no, I’m pissed.” Mccree cringed. “You didn’t say anything for more than a month now and almost made yourself sick. I thought you were dying, or something. You made Ana think you were wasted somewhere, at best, or dead in a corner, at worst. You sat around and put yourself through hell instead of speaking up, and then you shut yourself off and made half a dozen people worry about it. So yeah, I’m pissed.” He stood up, extending a hand to Mccree, who still sat on the floor. “Get up.”

Hesitantly, Mccree took the offered hand in his uninjured one, awkwardly trying to worm his way out of the space he’d wedged himself into.

“Where are we going?”

“Mercy’s lab. You’re gonna fix your hand and tell her what’s going on, got it? All of it. I’ll give you the rest of the day off, but you’re gonna be there tomorrow when Ana asks, understand? I don’t want to see this shit from you again. Blackwatch is supposed to be just as much a family as it is a job; you’re supposed to feel safe asking for help. You need something, say so.”

“Yes, sir,” Mccree sniffled, scrubbing a fresh set of tears off his cheeks.

Once again, Gabriel was struck by just how young he was. The minimum age for Blackwatch was usually twenty-one. It’d been years since he’d dealt with people Mccree’s age. The closest source of experience he had was Fareeha, and she was only twelve, still resting on the edge of adolescence, before the chemical shitshow of puberty hit her and made all of their lives that much more stressful. But at least he knew her. He’d been one of the people to raise her, so of course he did. Fareeha, Gabriel knew how to deal with. An emotionally fragile seventeen-year-old he pulled out of the desert, he wasn’t so sure. 

He sighed.

“Come here, kid.”

Almost immediately, Mccree lunged into the embrace like his life depended on it, hanging on to Gabriel’s shirt and shaking while Gabriel rubbed circles into his back. He absently thought of Reinhardt doing the same for Ana after a particularly ugly mission, softly humming and swaying her like he was dancing while Gabriel ran his fingertips over the new notches on her rifle and Ana screamed into the armor on Reinhardt’s chest. 

He felt powerless, then, watching from afar with his face spattered red from the blowback of his guns, sitting with his Jack on one side and Torbjorn on the other, feeling like he was broken and wrong for not reacting the way she did, wishing he could help her or anyone with Reinhardt-kindness rather than shotgun pellets. 

But, he noted now, as Mccree stopped crying, he could. And maybe that helped him, too.


	20. 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IM BACK WITH A BIGGER CHAPTER THAN USUAL SORRY FOR SUCH A WILD UPDATE SCHEDULE LATELY
> 
> BABBYS FIRST MISSION? YOU BETCHA
> 
> content warning for descriptions of violence and some gore !!!

“This should be a noncombat mission,” Reyes barked, standing upright in the shaking carrier, one hand braced on the equipment railing above him. “Our scouts said hostiles cleared out a few days ago, and we want to know why. We’re gonna drop about twenty miles out and we’ll make our way inward in a three day time cushion, and we hit the warehouse on the 30th, at the latest. Questions?”

“If it’s a noncombat mission,” Maksimovic began. “Why did you bring three Blackwatch agents?”

“Well, Alvarado and I are here for our students,” Robin chimed.

“And Soares is here because Montreal is on another deployment,” Reyes finished. From where she sat behind him, the woodchipped woman from the Gauntlet grinned. She looked far better now, but she still had an air of deadliness around her Jesse wasn’t keen on testing.  
“What about Captain Amari?” Kaufman asked.

“She has her own previous engagements. Also, she’s technically not Blackwatch.”

Previous engagements being her daughter, as Jesse’d learned. Fareeha’d come down with some menial cold, but Miss Amari leapt at the chance to spend some time with her daughter, and was going to take a few days to ‘make sure she recovered,’ which she’d privately admitted to Jesse meant taking her around the country on a short vacation. She’d said next time she and Jesse met for training, she might introduce them, which was exciting. He missed his own little sisters, and Miss Amari said Fareeha was a few years younger than him, probably in ballpark of the same age as Soledad. The thought was at once heartwarming and agonizing, so he tried to leave it alone. 

“Soares counts for two people, anyway,” Alvarado said. Soares grinned back at him. 

“That means we’re walking the twenty miles there, right?” Idowu talked with his hands, as Jesse’d noticed, very narrowly avoiding hitting Maksimovic in the face. “Are we doing that with all our gear?”

At the suggestion, both Kaufman and Maksimovic cringed. Alvarado laughed.

“Of course we’re doing it with gear,” he shrugged. “But we tend to travel pretty light. I wouldn’t worry about it so much.”

“Mmm. I’d worry more about how filthy your uniforms are going to feel.” Robin grumbled, spurring another chuckle from Alvarado and a violent cackle from Soares.

Their supplies were, in fact, painfully light, so much so Jesse quietly wondered if there was enough of anything at all. Their guns and other weapons all stayed strapped to their persons, Jesse with a pistol at his hip, an automatic rifle at his back, and a knife tucked into the sheath on his thigh. As always, Kvonch’s knife rested squarely in the small of his back, still hidden away for emergencies. Aside from their weapons, the heaviest things they all carried were probably their canteens. Jesse reluctantly sipped from his at Reyes’ insistence, still too used to water rationing to drink what was probably still less than healthy. He could make one of these last for a week or so, reasonably easy. Sure, he’d feel awful by the end of said week, but he could do it. 

They landed as planned, spending the day easing through the woods, Robin taking point more than any of the other older agents, demonstrating how to best stay quiet and avoid being detected. Soares had since disappeared at Reyes’ order, falling into the woods without a trace. 

Jesse was without both his spurs and his hat, a fact which he could understand, but left him a little anxious, nonetheless. He knew the hat wasn’t much use outside the desert, and would turn him into more of a target than anything, but he still wished he had it. It was tucked away in his room behind a chair and under a pile of laundry, hidden out of paranoia rather than any actual concern over it being taken. His boots were a similar situation; the metal stars made his footfalls painfully audible and he agreed having them gone was a good idea, tactically, but he felt almost unreal without the familiar weight of them resting at his heels. As it was, he could be quiet enough, managing to have startled Robin a little in wandering to his left side without his noticing. 

The woods were nothing like what Jesse was used to, though. Not unpleasant, but entirely unfamiliar, pine trees rattling in the breeze and making the air smell like warm bark, the ground spongy under his feet and the air light in his lungs. Idowu was far calmer than Jesse, apparently, freely wandering around the group as they walked and picking flowers off the ground, looping them in a chain and dropping it on Maksimovich’s head, who remained unphased. Kaufman received one shortly after, jumping a little at having it placed in her hands, as if she didn’t expect to get one at all. Nonetheless, she set it on her head, pinking at the radiant smile it earned her from Idowu and the snorted laughter from Maksimovich. 

Idowu kept making them, one after the other, until each of them wore one, Jesse included. Robin adjusted his periodically, carefully turning each of the flowers to face outward and tucking little bits of hair behind his ears, preening. Idowu was more hesitant to hand one over to Reyes, but did so anyway, earning him a stern look.

“Stop fucking around and be serious,” he deapdanned, delicately fitting the flowers over his hat. “We’re professionals.”

Alvarado laughed, at that, Robin covering his mouth with a hand and snickering. Reyes cracked a smile a moment later, making Idowu bluster out a chuckle, bracing his hands on his knees and wheezing.

“Okay. I thought I wasn’t supposed to laugh, and I was dying.”

The rest of day one went without much difficulty; Jesse’s crown came undone halfway through, and he opted to shove the flowers into his hair and the many pockets on his uniform rather than let them fall to the ground, which Idowu grinned at him for. 

The trees were rife with wildlife, every moment around them surrounded by a whirlwind of sounds: bugs humming, birds chirping, squirrels chattering or rusting around the branches. At one point, Kaufman pointed out a deer in the distance and they all fell silent for a while to watch it wander about. They stopped to eat lunch beside a tiny creek at which Jesse tried his damndest to catch a frog, and failed. It resulted in him finding a blackberry bush, though, and the group moved over there to snack off it. Mostly Reyes, who nearly picked it clean, tucking a few into a pocket of his bag ‘for Soares,’ but, judging by the look Robin sent his way, meant they probably weren’t going to make it that far at all. 

On that note, Soares remained elsewhere until they made camp, having forgone tents in favor of thermal blankets under the umbrellas of the pine trees. She appeared after the sun had started to go down, while Jesse and the others took turns starting a fire that Robin repeatedly and promptly threw dirt on until they’d all managed to do it individually. Reyes sat down with his back to the trunk of one of the trees with a packaged MRE in hand, whistling something like a bird call into the air. A moment later, the call was returned from a distance off, and Soares trundled into camp within the hour, needles in her hair and dirt under her fingernails. 

She threw herself down beside Jesse, of all people, who’d been sitting otherwise alone on a wide stone across from the other recruits and to the right of Reyes, all of them set up in a kind of lopsided triangle under the stars.

Jesse quietly shoveled the rest of his tasteless MRE into his mouth, carefully avoiding looking Soares in the eyes as she tore open her own and asked someone to throw her a spoon. She received a fork, but didn’t seem slowed down by it any. 

Now that she was closer, Jesse could take in exactly how beaten she was, written over in more scars than he’d seen in awhile. Her fingers were nicked around the sides from handling sharp things, he’d guess, and the joints of her fingers were oddly smooth from having been cut and scarred so many times. She was missing the lobe of one of her ears and there was a divot in the side of her nose, all of her looking worn in a way not unlike Jesse’s own mother. She was all hard edges, though, sharpened to a point and deadly in a way that came from a life of fighting, rather than time spent on a ranch. 

She caught him staring, and flashed a toothy grin, lips peeled back over her gums to flash her canines, and Jesse looked away just as fast, staring hard at the dirt between his feet. 

“Hey,” she rasped. “You mind if I light up?”

As she spoke, she drew a cigar from her breast pocket, idly rolling it between her fingers. 

“Go ahead,” Jesse mumbled, trying to ignore the itch in his head at the smell. Soares seemed to notice his subtly leaning a little closer, though, and she snorted, offering him a drag.

“Sweet shit, thank you,” he gasped, inhaling deep and letting the smoke tumble in his lungs. It was an awful habit, sure, but he was going to die young anyway, so he might as well make the most of it. Immediately, he felt the rush of nicotine slam into his skull, enough to make him a little dizzy. He’d been doing alright without them, but being able to smoke again was nicer than he’d expected. He blamed part of it on how perpetually stressed he was, still trying to acclimate. He’d gotten better, though.

Since he started on his injections again, his body righted itself back into its more natural rhythm; his weight started moving along a predictable, healthy line, his periods stopped again, his moods started balancing out, just a bit. Reyes disallowed him from training in compression clothes, which he resented more than words, but complied with. As much as he hated it, he had to admit breathing was easier, and he didn’t feel so tense all the time. He wasn’t particularly endowed in the first place, which was a small blessing in itself, and sports bras kept him flat enough to keep him sane, at least. Angela was thrilled with his progress, making him come in for weight and height checks every time she did his injections-- she wouldn’t allow him to do them himself until he was eighteen at least, for legal reasons-- and keeping it all written in his patient file. He’d grown a solid inch and a half in the three months since he’d arrived at Gibraltar, and gained more than 20 pounds in that same time.

He absently passed the cigar back to Soares, stumbling out of his inner thoughts as he billowed smoke out his nose. She whistled as he did, making him jump.

“Damn. Jefe, he smokes like I do.”

She cackled at her words as soon as she finished, slinging an arm over Jesse’s shoulders and knocking him against her side. Between the smoke and her laughter, the mood was a little infectious, and he grinned along with her.

“Knock it off,” Reyes grunted around a handful of blackberries that were decidedly not Soares’. “I didn’t budget for you two getting along. You’ll kill me.”

Soares busted into laughter again, jostling Jesse against her ribs.

The thermal blankets came out shortly after as the moon began to rise, Robin and Alvarado not-so-subtly shifting closer to Reyes as he set aside his things for the night. As soon as he pulled his blanket out and settled down, they darted over to either side of him, Alvarado very nearly tripping into his lap. Reyes snapped at them both, but made no move to shove them away, instead snatching the corners of their blankets for himself. 

Across the fire, Idowu offered one side of his blanket to Maksimovich, who shuffled against his arm, wrapped in a silver drape of her own. Kaufman eventually inched over as well and hesitantly settled near them, enough to share a little of the warmth. 

Jesse kept his own blanket in his bag and instead scooted closer to the fire, letting the chill of the air keep him awake. It was better than the nights in the gorge, when he had to sit up on the cliffs and watch the desert for anyone coming, dressed in his threadbare rags with nothing but a lighter to keep warm. 

Soares draped her own over her shoulders, still sitting about a foot away from him and slowly working her way through her cigar. After another few minutes, she knocked an elbow into Jesse’s side.

“You get the pneumonia, I’m not carrying your ass out of here,” she grunted.

Jesse snorted. “If I wear a blanket I’m gonna pass out. All bets are off, I’m gone.”

Soares chuckled, the quietest bit of laughter Jesse’d heard from her so far. He figured it was for Robin and Idowu’s benefits, who’d since started drifting off, Idowu with his cheek resting on top of Maksimovich’s head, and Robin’s forehead pressing into the side of Reyes’ neck, his mouth hanging open and snoring a little. Reyes occasionally shoved him a little away, only so he wouldn’t slip and break his nose on Reyes’ knee. 

Alvarado snickered as Robin bonelessly slid down Reyes’ shoulder, his face mashing comically against it while Reyes sighed.

“Parece que no es el único,” Alvarado snorted. Jesse startled a little at hearing him speak, his accent not like Jesse’s own, from somewhere he couldn’t quite place. Argentina, maybe. 

“Cuándo puedo llegar a estar entre de un par de hombres, usualmente esto no es que lo pienso,” Reyes moped, spurring a laugh out of Alvarado and Soares both. 

“Todos no podemos ser ganadores,” Jesse shrugged, making Alvarado whoop, clapping a hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter. Soares thumped a hand on his back, passing him her cigar, again. Reyes gaped at him for a moment, laying a hand over his chest in mock offense, doing his best not to jostle Robin’s head on his shoulder or Alvarado’s on his leg. 

“Alright, smartass,” he grinned. “You and Soares can take first watch, then.”

“Jefe,” Soares whined.

“Don’t start. You were gonna stay up anyway.”

“Still.”

“Wake me up when you need to switch over.”

“Wake up, I need to switch over.”

“Go to hell, Soares,” Reyes laughed, leaning back against his tree and folding his arms over his chest, letting his eyes fall closed. 

Soares didn’t talk, after that, instead finishing her smoke and grinding it out on her arm, sleek metal and silicon. It was the first Jesse really stopped to notice the fingers of her left hand were all prosthetic, the material scratched and buffed smooth from years of wear. She let the fire die down a little, and Jesse didn’t say anything, despite how cold he was getting. Sometime after the moon had peeked over the trees, he started to shiver, try as he might not to.

“Put the damn blanket on, kid,” Soares murmured, staring at nothing into the trees. She kept lazily glancing around the clearing, occasionally tipping her head this way and that, stock still and completely silent. She didn’t fidget the way Jesse did.

“I’ll fall asleep,” he warned her, folding his hands behind the back of his knees. It wasn’t cold enough to be dangerous, in his opinion; there wasn’t any wind chill down below the trees like there was at the top of the gorge. 

“Go ahead. Gonna need your head screwed on straight tomorrow. Eyes open.”

In the dark like this, Soares seemed an entirely different woman than the one she was at the Gauntlet, her horrific smile gone and the threatening aura around her somewhat lessened. Defensive, rather than aggressive. 

“Alright,” Jesse ventured, feeling like he was walking right into a trap. It might have been a test, a challenge to see if he’d slack off on watch when given the opportunity, but he had to admit he was cold, and tired, and wanted some rest. “Uh. Wake me up if you need somethin’?” 

Soares grunted in acknowledgment and Jesse yanked the blanket out of his tiny bag, wrapping it over his shoulders and reveling in the immediate warmth that started to sink into his bones. He was fighting for consciousness just as quickly, though, and Angela’s sleep aid wasn’t helping. He managed to stay awake for another few minutes before finally he passed out, head resting on his knees. 

Soares nudged him awake before the sun rose the next morning, knocking her shoulder into his until he jerked upright, gasping. As per usual, the burn of adrenaline followed it, stinging uncomfortably at the back of his brain and making his ears ring. 

“Up and at ‘em,” she crowed, her unruly explosion of hair pushed away from her face with a blue headband, making her look like a sunflower, a fact which Jesse had to choke back a laugh at.

He heaved himself up to his feet, cracking joints as he went, trying to ease the stiffness from his bones after sleeping on a rock. Robin seemed to be doing the same at Reyes’ side, whining about it all the while. He was entirely ignored.

If Soares looked like a sunflower, Idowu was definitely the sun, already up and beaming, bounding around the camp and humming something upbeat. Maksimovich was far less enthusiastic, but she didn’t seem bothered too much by Idowu’s antics, going so far as to return the playful punches he threw her way, dancing around her with all the violent intent of a daisy. Kaufman remained silent, drifting over to Robin’s side as they fell into a shambling herd and started heading north.

Today there was no training as they went, no bantered conversation, though the air between the group was far less awkward. Soares stayed nearby, this time, hanging at the back of the pack, once again at Reyes’ order, occasionally checking behind them with one hand perpetually on the gun at her hip, back to smiling hungrily. 

It was nice to listen to the forest wake up around them as the sun came up, first in the cawing of birds, then in the returning chitters and scuffling of squirrels in the trees up above. As the sun rose the air got warmer, still chilly in the shade, but pleasant enough when they got moving. Somewhere around midday, Reyes stopped them with a hand, addressing the group with new seriousness.

“We’re getting in range of defense systems, if they’re active. Watch your step, look for laser grids on the ground--” He kicked at the dirt with his boot. “--and listen for electrical humming. Don’t want one of you walking into a deep frier.” He waited a moment for the words to sink in, enough to be more than a little uncomfortable, before he continued. “Remember, just because you shouldn’t see combat, doesn’t mean you won’t. Don’t dick around, here. Keep your eyes open and guns up, understand?”

A chorus of ‘yes sirs’ came in response, accompanied by Soares’ ‘Sí, jefe.’

They approached the building slowly, after that, the old stone and concrete structure coming into view between the trees. They stopped once for Alvarado to disengage a tripwire, sparing Kaufman from a hard-light grid. After that, Jesse was a whole lot more aware of his footfalls.

Soares started drifting away the closer they got, returning periodically when Reyes tapped the communicator in his ear. She returned again when they reached the entrance to the building, pressed up against the side wall and crouched low in the underbrush. 

“We aren’t expecting any resistance, but guns are up and live in there, understand? Don’t be stupid about it. We’re gonna split into groups and head in on my mark.”

It was then Soares slipped back into view, pausing at Reyes’ side to murmur something into his ear before he continued.

“Robin, take Mccree and Idowu. Alvarado, you’re with Maksimovich and Kaufman.” He turned, this time addressing Idowu and Kaufman both. “You’re not always gonna have your instructors with you. You need to learn, first and foremost, how to communicate with your team, got it?” Then, as more of an afterthought, “Soares, with me.”

Soares took up residence at Reyes’ left, moving in tandem with him as if she were made to be there. Reyes flipped a quick hand gesture at Robin and Alvarado, and turned away, tabbing the safety off his own shotgun and disappearing around the corner. Alvarado nodded to Robin, and the two groups split apart, Jesse dutifully falling into step beside Idowu, his pistol in hand. The three of them crept into one of the buildings wide vehicle bays, sticking to the shadows, keeping their footfalls light. 

Robin kept his eyes wide open, gun in hand and fingers twitching, his index leaping for the trigger at any and every sound. Jesse swore he saw a bead of sweat start to slip down his forehead, and felt his anxieties start to rear their head in response. Robin might have been an excellent actor, but something told him this was more than an act, like he knew something they didn’t. Slowly they crept up a flight of stairs, passing over stacks of wooden crates and dismembered machinery, all of it looking fresh and relatively well-kept, barely brushed over with dust that floated in the air, turned gold by the sun pouring through the windows. If the place was abandoned, it looked like it had been pretty recently.

Up the stairs was a railed walkway from which they could look over the woods, the air tasting just barely like smoke. Jesse stepped away from the group to investigate it, neither Robin or Idowu hearing him go. He slipped a little further down the metal balcony, eyeing the rail and the ground beneath his feet until he found what he was looking for. A crushed cigarette, ground out on the rail and still streaming nearly-imperceptible coils of smoke into the air. They weren’t alone.

He jogged back to Robin as quietly as he could, making the man startle and turn around as he approached.

“Mccree? Where the hell? When did you--”

“We got company.”

Robin’s gun was upright and aimed as soon as the words left his lips, swinging around them in a wide arc.

“Where?”

“Dunno. Found a cigarette, still lit.”

Robin pressed a finger to the comm in his ear and relayed the same words again, waiting for Reyes’ orders. His voice came out tinny and unintelligible to Jesse, but Robin nodded. 

“Keep looking. Assume all unknowns are hostiles.”

Jesse and Idowu both nodded, once. 

After casing the rest of the balcony, they crept back down the stairs, Idowu with his back to Jesse and Robin both, his gun up and moving. Jesse searched the ground below them while Robin scoured the other stairway across the room, his rifle sighted and sweeping back and forth as they went. 

Below them, a screw hit the floor.

Instantly, all three guns swiveled toward the sound, a man in a black uniform standing below them, trying to pull another screw from his pocket, a gun at his hip. Jesse got there first and, without hesitation, he pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through the man’s head and into the stone floor behind him, followed shortly by the thump of the body hitting the ground. From elsewhere in the room, someone shouted, and Robin pressed a hand to his ear again.

“Hostiles spotted,” he hissed, and lined up his rifle with the oncoming noise. The three of them spread out along the long, railed off platform between stairwells, Jesse sticking close to Idowu for the covering fire his gun could provide.

Before Jesse could get a shot off at the second enemy, Robin’s rifle cracked, and they collapsed the same as the first, already starting to stain the sterile grey floors red. More men came after the first two, sweeping the floor and searching for the three of them tucked up on the catwalk. Robin fired again, taking another with it, and Jesse didn’t hesitate to do the same, staying tucked behind Idowu’s covering fire as he exchanged shots with the enemies on the ground. 

He ducked down to reload, ejecting the clip and slamming a new one in just as fast, back up and firing in the span of a breath. Robin recoiled a moment later, dumping the spent bullets from his gun and slamming the new ones in, taking up position in the same spot as before. Jesse covered Idowu as he did the same, taking out another three men before he was up and shooting again. Beside them, Robin spat an ugly string of curses and Jesse saw him crumple from the corner of his eye, curling protectively over one leg, but continuing to fire. 

More enemies kept coming, seemingly crawling out of the woodwork, barricading themselves behind the crates and firing one-handed from behind them, each trying to save their own ass. It was a painfully Deadlock tactic, so much so it made Jesse’s blood itch. He activated the targeting system in his eye, surrounding the exposed shooters with little red halos, making their shots easy to predict and easy to avoid. He returned fire on them as the ring in the center of his vision timed out, and he forced it right back on, taking the split second between charges to reload. 

He wasn’t stupid. They were outnumbered and outgunned, Robin was in poor shape, Jesse was running out of bullets in his pistol, and Idowu wasn’t doing much better. Chances were they were going to get picked off one by one, and that would be it. 

Before he could completely accept the fact, though, someone screamed, loud and brutal, like a war cry, and there was Soares, lunging from one person to the next, her gun in one hand and a knife in the other, doing equally as much damage with both. Reyes followed her, shotguns making quick work of anyone within range as they pressed back-to-back, moving serpentine through the room but remaining entirely in step, making Jesse think this wasn’t an unusual tactic for them to employ. From the opposite side of the room, he spotted Maksimovich, gunning down shooters from the door with Kaufman and Alvarado both tucked behind her, firing back over her shoulders or around her side. 

With six flankers and a head-on assault, the remaining men didn’t last long, each of them tumbling to the floor riddled with holes. As soon as the room was clear, Reyes whistled through his teeth, and Alvarado’s team came barrelling out of the doorway, Maksimovich carrying a massive gun that looked like it might have previously been something else’s mounted cannon. Robin made a valiant effort to do the same, but hissed out another choice bundle of curses as he sat back down, pressing a hand to his thigh.

Jesse exchanged a glance with Idowu and they moved to either of his sides, hoisting him up under the armpits and half-dragging him down the stairs. Soares very nearly hurled a knife at them before realizing who they were, her mouth turning back upright in a now-bloody, gruesome grin. 

“Look what the cats dragged in,” she sang, voice hoarse and chest still heaving, pupils blown wide with adrenaline. 

“Shut up, Soares,” Robin spat back. 

“Someone’s a little bitchy.”

“There is a _hole_ in my _leg_. I’m allowed to be bitchy.”

“Knock it off,” Reyes snapped. “I called in extraction. They’ll be here in the next ten minutes. Anyone else hurt, everyone accounted for?”

“All clear,” Alvarado and Robin replied in unison, the latter sounding far more bitter about it. 

“Good. Anyone find anything helpful, or did we just walk in here to get shot at like dumbshits?”

Maksimovich hefted the gun in her arms. “Gun.”

“These were amateurs,” Robin grunted as Jesse and Idowu settled him on the ground, Alvarado automatically going to his side and applying pressure to the shot. “They hardly communicated when they fought, and no one was willing to make a risky move for the rest of them. The way they held their guns made it look like they weren’t used to them, and they were sloppy. Too clumsy to be professionals.”

Again, the image of Deadlock arose in Jesse’s head, but this time, with an idea. With his knife, he made his way over to the closest body, wrinkling his nose at the mess of their face and drawing the knife at his shoulder. He hooked it in the fabric at their throat and sawed down, splitting the uniform in two with little resistance. Cheap, but better than rags. 

He peeled away the sides of the shirt, revealing a sprawling tattoo over the corpse’s chest in faded ink. Reyes came to stand behind him, one hand over his face. 

“Soares,” he barked, and she appeared in the same instant. “You know this one?”

She leaned in, taking the sheared shirt from Jesse’s hands and cutting it the rest of the way open, pulling the halves apart and wiping some congealed blood from the tattoo, revealing it in its entirety.

“Looks kinda like the old Red Rum brand.”

That tripped a memory in the back of Jesse’s skull, back when he’d first joined the gang.

“It’s Red Sarah,” he corrected, pointing at the steepled hands of the tattoo. “Red Rum took over Hellhunters and they changed the name. Deadlock dropped ‘em not long after.” Reyes patted his shoulder. 

“Good work. What do you know about them?”

“Not much,” Jesse shrugged apologetically. “I was only a few months in when they went off the grid. Deadlock didn’t want ‘em for business, anymore. Said they sold out under new leadership, or at least that was the rumor.”

“Explains why they stopped showing up in the activity map,” Reyes muttered, mostly to himself. Soares stood up and moved to another body, cutting open the shirt the same and looking for another tattoo. She moved from one to the other, occasionally rolling them over to get a better look at the chest. Jesse didn’t move to help her. One body was plenty for him. 

He heard the transport ship before it landed, the loud whine of the engines buzzing overhead. From its belly came a dozen Blackwatch agents from somewhere, but Jesse wasn’t feeling up to asking questions. His head hurt. His eye hurt. His ears were still ringing, and his body felt like lead, worn down from the afterburn of a fight. 

Reyes exchanged some brief words with the agents exiting the plane before the eight of them clamored inside, Alvarado and Soares carrying Robin, this time. As soon as they got in, Soares left Robin in Alvarado’s hands and started peeling off her uniform, dropping her bag on the floor and yanking a clean set of clothes from a cabinet under the table. Jesse and the other recruits politely averted their eyes, but Alvarado just sighed and kept working on Robin’s leg, undoing the zipper down one side of his thigh while Robin got the other, rolling the uniform away so he could get at the bullet wound easier. Soares vanished into the onboard bathroom, followed shortly by the sound of a shower, to Jesse’s surprise. He didn’t think the room would be big enough for one.

Reyes followed after Soares reemerged, now free of the blood previously clinging to her skin, wearing a new, clean set of clothes. After Reyes went Alvarado, supporting Robin under his arm. 

“Shower’s free,” he said rather unnecessarily, coming out the same as Reyes and Soares had, similarly dressed in a white T shirt and shorts. They were apparently one-size-fits-all, which is to say, they were all massive. Jesse was skeptical as to whether or not Soares was actually wearing pants whatsoever. 

Maksimovich was the first to take the offer, coming back out a few minutes later with damp hair and another huge t-shirt hanging off her frame. Next went Idowu, then Kaufman, and, after a few minutes of pointed glaring from Reyes, Jesse did too.  
Not that he actually used the shower, instead opting to change as fast as humanly possible, dunk his hair in the sink, and scrub down his hands and arms. 

Robin was already asleep when he came out, head resting on the tops of Reyes’ legs as he played cards with Idowu and Kaufman across the table. Idowu was losing.

A biotic emitter sat on the floor closest to Robin, of course, his shins tangled with Alvarado’s, who’d similarly fallen asleep with his head laid on the arm of the sofa. Soares was sitting near Reyes and had since calmed down, cackling whenever Idowu made a face at his cards or She got a glance at Reyes’ hand. Jesse settled onto the couch the other recruits shared, Maksimovich looking like she was trying to get some rest, but periodically glaring daggers at Idowu and Soares when they got loud. 

Jesse curled into the end of the sofa and let the sounds of the game soothe him now, before they turned into fodder for his oncoming headache. 

In his opinion, it hadn’t been a bad first run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanna thank yall again for bein so kind n patient w me since i started !! i kno sometimes my chapters can be a lil dry or inbetweeny or short but yall always have such nice things to say n it really means a lot to me !!! kno i read EVERY COMMENT, EVER even tho i might not respond !!! 
> 
> as always, if u have suggestions r thoughts/opinions on a chapter id love to hear em !!!!!
> 
>  
> 
> translations: (spanish isnt my first language and im still learning so if ive made any mistakes please let me know!!)  
> "parece que no es el único" = seems like he isnt the only one  
> "Cuándo puedo llegar a estar entre de un par de hombres, usualmente esto no es que lo pienso" = when i get to be between a pair of guys, this isnt usually what i think about  
> "Todos no podemos ser ganadores" = we cant all be winners


	21. 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO MUCH FOR THE 7-10 DAY UPDATE SCHEDULE,
> 
> for reals tho but thank yall much for bein patient w me i appreciate it !!!
> 
> school started up again n i just havnt had much energy since,, this chapters real short me bad but thank yall 4 yr patience

“Gabriel.”

“Jack.”

“You look awful.”

“Thanks, babe.”

Gabriel hauled himself into Jack’s office in Gibraltar’s upstairs, a coffee in hand and an aspirin still trying to work its way down his throat. It had been exactly nine days since the botched mission up in Canada, with Blackwatch intelligence agents still scrambling to figure out where the misinformation came from, who they needed to talk to, and who else they needed to kill.

Robin, as he’d heard, was back on his feet and training Kaufman again alongside her peers. Not that he’d seen him; he hadn’t left his office since they got back, spending all his time pouring over the reports in his inboxes, trying to find where the fluke came from. Gabriel was low on sleep, low on patience, high on stress, and definitely not in the right mood for an adult conversation, especially not with Jack.

Jack, who had requested him up to his office at 4 AM.

“Gabriel, I’m serious.” He shifted foot to foot, looking every bit like he wanted to reach out, but making no move to actually do so. “Are you okay?”

Gabriel made a wiggly hand gesture. “Eh. I’ve been better, I’ve been worse.”

“We could do this another time,” Jack offered. 

Gabriel very, very much wanted to do this another time. Unfortunately, he knew Jack didn’t honestly want to wait, and he knew if given the opportunity to get some rest, he’d only keep working, so he declined. In all honesty, the suggestion was an empty one. Neither of them were going to take it, and they knew it. 

“What did you need, Jackie?” The nickname tumbled out of his mouth without his thinking or willing it to, bouncing across the air like a drink spilled over the lip of a glass.

“I… uh.” Jack cleared his throat. “Depends, really? We can stay with business, or we can get into… relationship. Things. If you’re… up for that. If not we can just. Wait. Again.” The last part was more a thought spoken aloud than anything, quiet and bitter. 

Gabriel sighed. “No, no it’s fine. We should talk. I’m gonna tell you, though, I’m not in the best mood for it,” he warned. Then, softer, “I’m gonna try, Jack, I really am, but I want you to know I’m already on edge, alright? If I get pissy, don’t blame yourself. That’s on me.”

Jack hummed his assent, but said nothing more.

“So.”

“So.”

“Where do you want to start?”

Jack blustered a sigh out of his lips, threading a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots. 

“The beginning?”

“Beginning of this one or the _beginning_ , beginning?”

“I don’t know.”

Jack scraped his fingernail against the side of his thumb. A moment later, a swell of red crested over the skin, though he didn’t seem to notice. Gabriel fought between staying where he stood and reaching out to take his hands, holding them in his own to stop them both from their destructive habits. As it was, Gabriel found himself chewing away on the inside of his cheek, lost in familiar territory. He didn’t know what was in bounds and what wasn’t. Were it any of the others, he’d be closer already; if it were Ana, they would sit on the floor and sprawl across one another while they talked, if it were Reinhardt, he’d have been pulled into at least one embrace by now, hands resting on his shoulders or gently holding his face, if it were Torbjorn, then. Then he probably would have received an elbow to the middle, but an affectionate one. With Jack, he didn’t know what to do, anymore.

Back in the SEP they were close, close enough to have at least offered a hand on a shoulder or a brush against one another’s arms. In the Crisis, they wouldn’t be more than an inch between them. If things were still like they were then, they’d be twined together in a minutes-long embrace, heads resting on one another’s shoulders, feeling the rolling heartbeat of sound against their chests when they spoke.

Now, Jack and Gabriel stood three feet apart and didn’t touch at all.

“...Alright,” Gabriel said. “What’s upsetting you?”

Jack shifted on his feet, uncomfortable. 

“I. It’s stupid. You won’t like it.”

“Doesn’t matter if I like it. I want to know what you’re thinking, Jack. Can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s broken.”

Jack pulled on his hair again, antsy, frustrated.

“It just. It feels like Blackwatch-- work-- is more important to you than anything else. Not just me. It feels like you’re putting it before everything lately, yourself included.” He made a broad gesture at Gabriel’s face as he spoke, blue eyes scraping over the sunken-in bags under his brown ones. “I understand Blackwatch means a lot to you, I know that, but. Isn’t there such thing as too much?”

No.

Well, of course there was, but the immediate, knee-jerk reaction in his mind was _absolutely not_ , and Gabriel very narrowly managed to bite down on the words before they left his mouth. In his opinion, he didn’t spend enough time on Blackwatch, not at all. He could pour every moment of his life into it, and it wouldn’t be enough. 

Jack had a point, though. Gabriel hadn’t hardly slept a wink since they'd gotten back, instead choking down what were, frankly, frightening amounts of caffeine and spending countless hours pouring over every bit of information he could get his hands on. It was more than a little unhealthy, he knew, but he needed to know. The day he let things slip under the radar was the day he’d retire, and no sooner.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “I know I've been distant lately, especially since Canada. I'm sorry for ignoring you; I know it drives you up the walls.”

“I just… I don’t understand why you're so hellbent on this, Gabriel.”

“On what, Canada?”

“Canada, Blackwatch in general.”

His first thought was something petty and bitter, but he kept his mouth shut. Being petty wasn't going to help anything. He needed to be honest, more than anything. He needed to open up his end of the communication and give Jack an opportunity to do the same.

“Robin got shot.”

“I heard. They-- he’s alright, right?” Jack fumbled the pronoun in his mouth as he spoke, cautious. He didn't know which one Robin was, not really. Gabriel didn’t blame him, too much. He had his own mess of agents to keep track of, he understood Jack not being able to remember Blackwatch’s. 

“Yeah. He’s up and moving again, but. I can't stop thinking he wouldn't have gotten hit at all if we were better with our intel. We had the newbies on that mission. All I can see in my head is them coming back fewer than they left.”

Jack’s face softened. “But they all came back, didn’t they? It could have been worse.”

“Could’ve been better, too. It's my job to keep them informed, you know? If I start letting things slip, there’s gonna be casualties.” 

“We’re soldiers, Gabriel. There's always casualties.”  
“You don't think I know that?” he snapped back, and immediately wished he hadn't. “Sorry. I didn't mean to yell.”

“I know.”

“I just. I hate losing agents, Jack. More than anything. When Overwatch agents go, they get eulogies, obituaries, funerals, somebody notices. A Blackwatch agent dies and nobody remembers them in the first place.” He wiped his hands down his face, sighing.

“I… I don't know how to help you with that.”

“I know. I'm just thinking out loud, mostly. I hate the way things turned out, sometimes.”

“But you love Blackwatch,” Jack frowned, brow creasing together perfectly in the middle the way it did when he got confused.

“Of course I do. It's selfish, I know, but I wish my agents got the hero schtick too. Wish they got some recognition for the things they did.” 

“You’d want Blackwatch to be public?” he squawked, incredulous.

“No. No, God no. I’m not an idiot, Jack, I know how that would end. We couldn't move the way we do if the world knew what we were up to. Still, I can't help thinking about it. I'm not asking for answers, or anything, just trying to get some thoughts out of my head.”

Jack nodded, staring vacantly at the floor and absently picking at his hairline.

“What’re you thinking, boyscout?”

“Just thinking,” Jack murmured.

Gabriel gave him a minute to sort through his thoughts, picking up a rubber band ball from the desk at his side and rolling it between his hands. 

“Why--what makes you. Hmm,” Jack waited another few seconds before he spoke again, still trying to sort out the words he was going to say. Gabriel appreciated his trying to be conscientious. “I’m not sure how to ask without sounding like a dick, but. Why are you so dedicated to these people? You know how I feel about… some of your agents.” Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “But regardless of what I think, I want to know why they’re so important to you.” 

“They’re good people, Jack,” he pointed out. 

“They-- you know what I think.”

“You think they’re all bastards and traitors, I know.”

“Not all of them!” he shot back, then flushed. “And I don’t think that.”

Gabriel folded his arms over his chest. Conversation was going about as well as he’d expected. 

“Whatever.” He rolled his shoulders, as much a challenge as it was trying to push the uncomfortable stiffness from them. “I care so much because they’re people worth caring about. I know you don’t think so, but I do. You don’t see them like I do. You seem them on missions, when, yeah, they’re a bunch of bloodthirsty mongrels; that’s what we train them to be. But they’re good people, under that. And as much as it ties your head up in knots, even the ex cons are good people, too.” Sometimes especially the ex cons. Most of them knew cruelty as intimately as they knew themselves. They fought twice as hard to keep it from happening to anyone else. They were loyal, and brave, and a hell of a lot smarter than anyone gave them credit for, as much as Jack might hate to hear it. A little more than half of Blackwatch’s field agents were gangrunners and criminals, and about a quarter of the stationaries. They were people who fucked up and made a few bad choices, but they were still people, and good people, at that. 

“I know, Gabriel. I just worry.”

“About?”

“Them turning on you. Some of them have gone turncoat before, even more than once.”

“Went turncoat on their gangs. You’re saying they’re bad people for doing a good thing.”

“I know that, too! It’s just some of them give me a bad feeling, like--”

Gabriel groaned. “This isn’t about Soares again, is it?” 

“She’s a monster, Gabriel, you can’t trust her!”

“She’s the most loyal agent I have, Jack.” To a fault, actually. 

“How long is that going to last?”

“Longer than you’re giving her, apparently! What do you want, for her to swoop in and catch a bullet for me? Newsflash, Jackie, she’s done it before!”

“It’s not just her,” he protested. Gabriel rolled his eyes hard enough to give himself vertigo. “The new one you brought in, he--” 

“We have this conversation every time I bring in new ones.”

“He’s unpredictable! You said it yourself that he’s anxious. You’re putting a gun in the hands of a skittish teenager, and going on the hope that he’s not going to turn that against you!”

“Sorry, have I heard this before? Like when I brought in Nakano, or Carlston, or O’Donnell, or--”

“I just don’t want to see you hurt!”

“We’ve been over this, Jack. I’m not your responsibility, and I can take care of myself.”

Jack yanked at his hair, taking a handful of blonde with him. 

“I know that! I still _worry_. I can’t stop thinking about it, lately. We’ve just been fighting, and I hardly see you, and I’m terrified that something’s going to happen, and I’m not going to be there, and the last thing we said to each other was something awful.” His breath came in stressed gasps, now, short-clipped fingernails digging into his scalp and coming away bloody. “I keep having nightmares about it, that you die out there thinking I hate you, and--” 

Oh. Oh, Jack. Fuck, Gabriel was stupid. He knew Jack, he should have known there was more to his bad mood than the Blackwatch agents. He should have seen the stress lines at the corners of his eyes, the haggard look to his appearance, the dark circles, the everything.  
Privately, Gabriel was terrified of the same thing. He dreamt about it too, that they were back in the Crisis and things went wrong, that for whatever reason the last thing he’d said to any of them was ‘I hate you.’ It wasn’t just Jack, either. Sometimes it was all of them, all but Gabriel. In his opinion, those were better than the ones where it was only one of them that died; no one was there to hate him for it but himself, when it was just him left. 

Gabriel lurched forward and grabbed Jack’s hands in his own, pressing them to his cheeks where they rested, cold and clammy against his skin.

“Jack. Jack, look at me. Breathe. Deep breath, cariño. I’m here. We’re both here.”

The little bit of contact was like a sledgehammer to a glass dam, Jack collapsing into him, burying his face in the side of Gabriel’s neck. Gabriel, in turn, moved his hands from Jack’s and instead to his waist, one tangled in the fabric of his shirt and the other in his red-rooted hair. 

He at once hated and loved to see Jack like this. Not that he loved to see Jack hurting, God no, but to see him emotional at all beyond ‘pissed off.’ He was the same back in SEP, made only worse by the Crisis, in Gabriel’s opinion. He was so careful about who saw him feel and who didn’t, packing everything instead back into his head until he broke. He’d let himself go around Gabriel and the others, but they hadn’t all seen each other in months, and he and Jack were fighting, so god knows the last time he’d allowed himself to be emotional, at all. 

Now, Jack continued gasping out panicked sobs against Gabriel’s chest, shaking like a leaf, cold sweat shining on the back of his neck.

“Relax, Jackie,” Gabriel tried to assure him. “We’re okay. Stay right here, right now, alright? I-- we-- it’s gonna be okay. I just need you to trust me. Trust me, Jack, please.”

“I’d trust you with anything. You know that, don’t you?” Jack croaked, lifting his face, red and tear-streaked. Gabriel lifted his hands to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. 

“Me too, cariño, me too.” He knocked his forehead against Jack’s. “Just trust me with Blackwatch. Trust me to be right there when you need me to be, I promise I will be. You don’t have to trust the agents, but have some faith in me. I might be a softie at heart, but I’m not a pushover.” He said the last part with a smile on his face, gently running his fingers over the clipped-short hair at the base of Jack’s neck. “I’ll be alright. And if I’m not, you’ll be there to make sure I get back.”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut, inhaling shaky. Collecting himself back into a commander again, trying to steady his breathing by lining it up with Gabriel’s and forcing some stillness back into his limbs.

“I’d fight the Crisis again, if I had to,” he rasped. “I do trust you, Gabriel. I do. I’m still so… scared, sometimes.” The words sounded more like thoughts than words at all, barely stirring the air between them, they were said so quietly. Like they would have cut open Jack’s tongue, had he said them any louder. “Sometimes, I wish they’d never separated us at all. That we lead this together. All of us.”

A pretty thought, one Gabriel’d had, himself, imagining a team run by the five of them, all together and unstoppable. He wouldn’t be so lonely, anymore. Jack and Ana wouldn’t get run as ragged, not when they had each other to help share the load. Reinhardt and Torbjorn would get titles they deserved, get the recognition they deserved, get to do the good they always wanted to. They’d all be whole, complete, safer. They could find their support in each other, rather than having to force themselves to trudge through their battles, hanging on by the last hairs of their sanity.

Maybe, in a perfect world, they’d each get a sector of agents to themselves, each a commander of their own right. Torbjorn would take on the brightest, the engineers and mechanics and tinkerers of all sorts, shaping them into an infallible, sarcastic collection of geniuses like him. Reinhardt could take the real heroes among them, the ones who stood at the front lines with nothing more than a piece of cardboard and their bodies to protect the people behind them, if they had to, the genuine, steel-hearted, kind ones, just like him. Ana would have a gaggle of snipers and field medics with filthy quips to rival Torbjorn’s, incomprehensibly smart and just as tenacious, ready to take on the world but just as remorseful about the lives they’d have to end in order to do it. Jack’s group would be soldiers, like him. Maybe, just maybe, he could show them the person he was behind the commander, the anxious, gangly thing he became when he stopped standing up so straight, who lectured people for eating all his cereal and busted his stitches laughing at an abandoned car with an uprooted toilet stuck in the driver’s seat. Gabriel, of course, would have the same people as he did now. And that was precisely the problem. 

The four of them could congeal into Overwatch without a hitch, but Gabriel couldn’t. He was Blackwatch, at heart, and each of his agents would be, too. There wouldn’t be just one organization for all of them. 

Gabriel smiled again, sadder than the first. 

“Which one would we be leading?”

Jack sighed. “Not the one you’d be happiest with.”

Gently, he pressed his lips to the angry red marks on Jack’s brow before folding him back into another embrace where they both stayed, silent and swaying, until the base began to wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always if theres any suggestions r things i can improve on dont hesitate to let me kno !!!! i love hearin from yall n gettin yr feedback


	22. 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back streets back ALRIGHT
> 
> thank yall for yr patience n concern since i posted last it warms me heart !!!! this chapter might be paced weird n might not read too great but i really wanted to get something out n needed to just get some progress done in the story !!! next chap is gonna have fareeha shenanigans n ill try to get it out w out so much of a wait next time lmao
> 
> again thank you everyone for the kind words n concern it makes my day to hear ever comment yall leave !!!!!!!! heres some. shenanigans ft. emotional plot

“No way. No way in hell.”

“Yeah? Not sure what’s got y’all so surprised.”

“It kind of suits you, actually.”

“You did wipe those down with rubbing alcohol or something before you gave them over, right? If Mccree’s face falls off because you had some weird blood infection, Reyes is gonna kill you.”

“Of course I did! I’m not a fucking heathen.”

Defranco and Nakano continued bickering as Idowu poked and prodded at Jesse’s face, turning his jaw this way and that to get a better look at him. Kaufman peered over his shoulder, looking a little like she’d come across some revolutionary piece of information. Maksimovich just tried to eat her lunch, as well as she could with Robin leaning over the table to get a better spot for rubbernecking. 

“They’re piercings, not the DaVinci code,” she grunted.

“We’ve known each other for fourteen months--” Idowu said.

“Seventeen,” Kaufman corrected.

“And none of us ever knew your whole _face_ was pierced. You look like a hooligan.”

“You’re a hooligan,” Jesse slurred, face mashed together by Idowu’s hands.

“You take that back, you absolute rabblerouser.”

“Can I eat my food? Please?”

Robin sat back in his chair, giving Maksimovich a brief reprieve. 

“I’m with Idowu, really,” he said. “I mean, I guess I could have expected you to have them, all things considered.”

“Is that all?” Kaufman asked, just barely hovering over Idowu’s shoulder; close, but not touching. She didn’t like to touch, as Jesse’d learned. Robin was an exception, but only in the sense that he was just about the only person she’d fall asleep on when they took shifts. 

Sometimes she’d doze off with her back to Idowu’s, and he’d send pictures captioned ‘I've been blessed’ every time, without fail. 

“Yeah?” The metal was cool, but familiar on his skin. Two under his lower lip, two in his left brow and one in his right, four on each ear, one on his septum. The latter didn’t really count, in his opinion, seeing as he never wore anything in it.

Alvarado settled down at the table beside Robin, handing off his tater-tots in the same motion.

“Hey, Alvarado’s got piercings,” Jesse pointed out. “Why aren’t y’all so interested in his?”

“He wears them all the time,” Robin said, neatly divvying up his newly-gifted tots between himself and Maksimovich. “Same with Defranco, and Montreal. We already knew about theirs. Yours were a dramatic reveal.”

“You’re a dramatic reveal,” Alvarado deadpanned, mouth full of chicken wrap. Robin glared at him.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“You don’t make sense,” Maksimovich grunted, and met Alvarado halfway for a high-five.

“What else are you hiding? Are you, like, secretly covered in tattoos?” Nakano bounced in her seat, arm hooked under Defranco’s throat in a headlock while he futilely scrabbled at her forearm.

Jesse snorted. “No. I ain’t covered in tattoos.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to have _some_ ,” Idowu pressed. Jesse raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Feel like that’s a question you ask _after_ you buy me dinner.”

Robin clapped his hands together. “Ha! So you do have more.”

Son of a bitch. “I never said that.”

Nakano jostled Defranco in her arms, who had since given up on trying to escape.

“He’s turning red. Oh my god, you absolutely have more. Is it, like, an ex’s name? Is it a tramp stamp?”

“Robin has a tramp stamp,” Alvarado supplied. 

“There’s nothing wrong with tramp stamps!” Robin squawked. 

“I think that’s a derogatory term,” Kaufman said.

Alvarado kept going, despite Robin’s swatting at him. “It’s super cheesy, too. I was there when he got it.”

“It’s tasteful!”

“You have a zombie butterfly above your ass. It says “Lady Death” in cursive.”

“Tasteful! And when you call it a zombie butterfly, of course it sounds dumb.”

“It is dumb.”

“You’re dumb!” Robin jabbed a finger at Jesse. “Mccree, back me up.”

“Tramp stamps are a mistake,” he said. Idowu gasped.

“You _do_ have a tramp stamp.”

“I never said that!” His voice cracked halfway, incriminating him beyond a doubt.

“Holy shit,” Defranco wheezed, still trapped in Nakano’s hold. “Mccree’s got a tramp stamp.”

Nakano opened her mouth to say something else, but Jesse lunged across the table before she got a chance. Beside her, Maksimovich drew a knife out of her pocket. 

“Let me eat my lunch in peace, or I won’t fucking hesitate.”

In flinging himself at Nakano, however, Jesse managed to free Defranco, who scooted to the other side of the table, coughing and laughing at once. 

“Karma, bitch,” he choked, as Nakano valiantly tried to wrestle Jesse off her, cackling all the same. 

“What the fuck is going on?”

The group froze as every head swiveled at once, all falling onto Reyes, who stood at the head of the table, duffle bag slung over his shoulder. Upon seeing Jesse, he grimaced.

“Please tell me you didn’t pierce Mccree’s face.”

“His face was already pierced,” Kaufman assured him.

“He’s also got a tramp stamp,” Idowu blurted. Jesse swung around and decked him square in the face. 

“Robin has a tramp stamp,” Reyes said. “I was there when he got it.”

“Wait, what the fuck were you _doing_ when you got that?” Maksimovich asked, knife still out and pointed threateningly at Jesse. 

“It’s a long story.”

“Headed somewhere?” Montreal asked, gesturing at the bag over Reyes’ shoulder. 

“In a few days. Was gonna take Soares and see if we could get some information out of the gangs near Red Sarah.”

“Ooh, can we come?” Nakano gasped. Defranco glared at her.

“Don’t ask for me,” he snapped, straightening his shirt. “Can I come?”

Reyes paused, then shrugged. “Talk to Soares. If she’s up for company, sure.”

Defranco went a little pale, and Nakano grimaced.

“Ok, maybe not,” she said.

“I talk to her, can I tag along?” Jesse asked.

Reyes made an odd face. “You’ve got training to do, kid.”

Jesse sat back on the bench, picking at his food. The air went a little awkward, then, no one else really opting to speak. The others had gone on a lot of missions, since Canada, most of them combat and some even unsupervised by Robin, Alvarado, or Montreal. Jesse had been allowed on none of them. The only time he’d left Gibraltar since was when Reyes sent him to a little town outside Numbani for a few months, ‘to learn how to blend in with an unfamiliar place,’ a task none of his peers needed to complete. Jesse wasn’t stupid. He was getting benched from missions, and he knew it. He couldn’t figure out why, though, at least not on his own. He was still hesitant to ask Reyes, even if he knew Blackwatch was safe, and there wouldn’t be any horrible repercussions for doing so. Old habits, and all that.

“Oof, uh. I’m gonna. Go.” Idowu pushed up from the table, grimacing. Jesse felt a little bad for making everything uncomfortable, but in complete honesty, he was feeling a little petty, and he didn’t really care. 

The rest of lunch was silent, on his end. Defranco told him he could keep the jewelry, if he wanted, which Nakano loudly encouraged him to do. Jesse took them with a quick thanks and faked smile, excusing himself then to go sulk somewhere. 

He retreated back to his room, picking up laundry and absently digging around his clean clothes while he tried to figure out exactly what he’d done to earn himself a _grounding._

Reyes said he’d done excellent on the Canada mission when he delivered his report, praising him for quick thinking and lauding him even more so for being able to ID the gang responsible. Reyes called him a natural, said he had all the makings of a great agent, told him he would go places and do great things. And then he had Jesse benched for eight months. 

He kicked a t-shirt. What had he done wrong? Why was he in trouble? 

“Athena?” he asked nothing in particular, plopping himself down on the floor amid the clean clothes he’d dumped out, making a halfhearted attempt to sort through them.

“Yes, agent Mccree?”

“Does Reyes hate me, or somethin’?”

“Hate you?” She sounded genuinely perplexed by the question.

“Yeah. I mean, he won’t talk to me, n’ he won’t let me go anywhere, and he keeps tryin’ to send me… wherever’s not here, really. Tends to make a guy wonder.”

Athena took a long moment to respond, the only indication she’d heard him at all being the slow turn of her logo on the door panel.

“Commander Reyes does not hate you, Mccree. I would recommend speaking with him, to ask him these questions yourself.”

Jesse cringed. “Don’t think I’m dumb enough to go running into his office and demanding answers.”

“When you put it like that, perhaps not. But a more civilized conversation would be helpful, I think.”

“I don’t wanna bother him. He’s got more important things to worry about then my bitching.”

Athena paused. “Actually,” she said. “My records indicate he’s ‘sitting with his thumbs up his ass,’ waiting for the U.N. to ‘chew his dick’ for a recent infraction.” 

Jesse spluttered out a laugh. 

“Or so he said.” She sounded a little like she was smiling, too. “Should I tell him you’re coming?”

“You’re tryin’ to get me killed, Athena, I swear,” he sighed. “But yeah, would you please?”

“Of course, agent Mccree. And I assure you, were I trying to get you killed, I would be much more obvious about it.”

He laughed, because Athena was a force to be reckoned with. 

About halfway down the hall to Reyes’ office, though, he regretted everything. Who was he to complain about anything? Reyes had given him a place of his own accord, spent time and money and resources keeping him alive and well, put up with his whining and stupidity until now, and how was Jesse repaying him for it at all? Complaining. Asking for more, like an entitled child. He was horrible, really. Horrible and greedy and pathetic. Nothing was ever enough, was it? He couldn’t just be satisfied with where he was, couldn’t just settle down and take the cards he’d been dealt, couldn’t not look a gift horse in the mouth. He wasn’t smart. Smart people didn’t tempt fate the way he did.

 _Lucky ones do_ , a voice whispered at the back of his head, conspiratorial and familiar enough to make his insides twist. _And you’re the luckiest kid I ever met, hermanito._

Guess it was time to test that theory. 

Reyes’ door was partially ajar, the seabreeze nudging it open every now and again, like the building was a living, breathing thing, and this office was its lungs.

Jesse knocked anyway.

“That you, kid?”

He poked his head through the door, and Reyes waved him in. Jesse lingered in the doorway for a moment, unsure whether or not he was supposed to close it or not.

“You can close the door if you want. Or not; it doesn’t matter to me.”

He left it open. The couch against the wall across from Reyes’ desk was soft as he remembered it, well-worn and welcoming, soothing in the way lived-in things were. He tried to look nonchalant, but Reyes’ presence had the uncanny ability to make him honest, the same as his mother’s did, and he found himself ditching his boots to pull his legs closer to his chest. 

“What’s on your mind, kid?”

He could say something. He could ask real questions, and he knew Reyes would give him real answers, but survival instincts were hard to kill. 

“Wanted to apologize for bein’ all passive-aggressive when you stopped by the table,” he lied, and it was easy as breathing. He didn’t fidget, or sweat, or let his heart sped up in its tempo, because Jesse Mccree, among other things, was an excellent liar.  
Too much so, apparently.

“You lie like you’re telling the truth,” Reyes said, but he didn’t look angry. A little impressed, actually. “If I wasn’t me, I’d believe you. That’s a good thing,” he added, when Jesse started to feel cold terror settling in his feet.

“What’s really bothering you, Mccree? I’m not gonna be mad.”

He scoured Reyes’ face, his posture, his breathing, searching for any indicator he might be lying, too. Realistically, Jesse knew he wasn’t-- he hadn’t seen Reyes direct any real, violent anger at his agents once in the more than a year he’d been a part of Blackwatch. 

Still, he carefully took stock of the open door in his peripheries and estimated the amount of time it would take him to be up and out of the room, comparatively to how long it would take Reyes to do the same. Insurance, he reasoned, even if he didn’t need it. It made him feel better. 

“Why am I in trouble, hoss? I mean, I thought I did pretty good in Canada. I just wanna know what I did wrong.”

Reyes gaped at him for a moment, and dropped his face in his hands.

“I’m so fucking stupid,” he groaned. “You’re not in trouble, kid. This one’s all on me.”

Did he just… forget him, or something? How was this anyone’s fault but Jesse’s own? How was anything?

“Uh.”

“I benched you after Canada because you saw live fire when you weren’t supposed to.”

“So did the others?”

“No, I know they did. You’re different there because you…” Reyes grimaced. “Your Blackwatch membership, technically, is illegal.”

“Because--”

“No, not because of Deadlock. You ever notice no one’s young as you are? Kaufman, I think, was one of the youngest in her unit. Maksimovich, too. You’re still too young to be legally inducted into Blackwatch of your own accord.”

“I’m eighteen, now, though?”

“Entry age here is twenty-one.”

Jesse paled. “You were gonna bench me until then?”

“No, that’s. That would be a _real_ dick move. I was trying to figure something out before then.”

“...And?”

“You ever thought about going back to Nigeria?”

“Sorry, uh, fuckin’ what?”

“I mean, that was one idea. You could go back there, to the town I sent you. Ibadan is pretty close, and they’ve got a great art school. Numbani’s got all the engineering schools you could ask for. Businesses are booming, economy’s great, law enforcement’s actually pretty competent, if that’s where you want to go.”

“You want me to go to _college_?”

“If you want. If not, you could just. Find a place to make a life. Anywhere, I mean. Not just Nigeria, if you don’t want.”

“Uh, first of all, I never even went to high school--”

“We can work around that.”

Reyes looked a little like he was pleading; definitely sounded like it. Made Jesse a little guilty to refuse.

“--second, I don’t think I could do domestic if I tried, boss. And I’ve tried.” Tried and failed, obviously. 

“You don’t want to just… give a normal life a shot? If you like where you put yourself, after all this, you can stay out there, too. Blackwatch won’t ever bother you again, if you don’t want. You get a free out, no strings attached.”

He was honestly begging, now, as if any alternative would be as good as a death sentence. It would almost definitely be a death sentence, of course, but Jesse knew that when he signed up for it. He was counting on it, really. Didn’t know what he’d ever do with a life to himself.

“Someone asked you to drop everything and move to Nigeria, jefe, could you do it?”

Reyes sighed, sagging. “No, kid. I couldn’t.”

“We got any other options?” he ventured.

Reyes cringed. “I mean, we _do_ , but I doubt you’ll like them.”

“I don’t like carrots, either, but sometimes we gotta make sacrifices.”

“Are you talking about pot pie day?”

“I am talking, specifically, about pot pie day.” 

Reyes snorted. “Alright. You’ve got three-- four options, if I’m thinking right.”

“Alright.”

“One, you wait until you’re at age. one way or another. Two, I can pull some strings to get you in with the stationaries for… however long you want, really. I guess that one could count as option one.”

“What else we got?”

Reyes at back in his seat, gnawing on his cheek. 

“Here’s where it gets. Complicated. Three is you get parent or guardian consent, but I’m not gonna make you do that if you don’t want,” he added, when Jesse flinched, hard. 

“Option four?”

“Option four is the same as option three, but with more legal bullshit involved. You need guardian consent, but it doesn’t have to be from the guardians you have now.”

“Uh. I don’t think I know what you’re saying, here, boss.”

“I mean, if you can get someone to sign on as your legal guardian, then they can authorize you being out on the field.”

Jesse blinked at him a few times, trying to roll the words over in his head in a way that made any ounce of sense. Reyes needed him to walk up to someone and ask if they’d be interested in adopted some fucked-up teenager, so they could send said teenager to go die in combat.How the hell was that supposed to work? How was that supposed to work when his parents were still alive? What would happen if and when they realized they now shared custody of their son with some fucker they’d never even heard of? And speaking of said fucker, who was Jesse even supposed to ask? Sure, he had great friends, and someone would probably do it, but it felt… wrong. Like he was betraying the family he already had. Again, his brain piped up, and he didn’t correct it. 

Asking something like that wasn’t exactly light conversation, or a quick favor, either; it was putting one Jesse Mccree under another person’s name, making for unneeded legal tape for someone else, and giving him another family reputation to smother with his mistakes. 

Maybe he should have just gone to prison when he had the chance. Someone might have killed him by now. 

“I’m not saying you have to do anything now,” Reyes assured him, likely having taken note of Jesse’s dumbstruck face. “And the guardian thing--it’s just an option.”

An option Jesse didn’t have, more likely than not. He was too much of a coward to ever ask that of anyone, even if he had a person to ask.

“Uh.”

“Just. Think about your options, alright? You’d have a bright future wherever you go, kid, really. I don’t want you to wake up one day and realize that this--” He gestured widely at the room around them. “--was a mistake. It’s not an easy one to fix, once you get into the deep shit.”

“I’ll, uh. Keep that in mind,” Jesse mumbled, still valiantly trying to sort out the growing migraine of thoughts rattling around his head. 

He stumbled upright, not really looking at anything in particular, too busy making a plan, then shelving it, then making a new one, ad infinitum. He needed safe zones; outs to every conceivable scenario he fell into, and Reyes had just given him a few dozen to try and work through. 

“Mccree.”

He turned, and Reyes flashed him a concerned look.

“Anytime you need to talk, I’m here. I mean it.”

Jesse nodded, and walked out the door.


	23. 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERES ANOTHER CHAPTER, ACTUALLY ON TIME
> 
> it was supposed to be one BIG one but i split it into 2 parts so i could get it out on time lmao  
> the next bit hopefully should come out in another week or so
> 
> again i dont think ,, its my best work but !!! not everything can be perfect i spose  
> (however if u got suggestions or critiques ESPECIALLY regarding pacing id love hearin em !!)
> 
> AN AMARI.... APPEARS  
> TEEN ANGST......ALSO APPEARS
> 
> ANYWAYS HERES THIS

Across the hall, someone was snoring. 

The moon was hung high overhead, making the sea turn shiny below it, interrupted only occasionally by the bats that flickered black against the sky to grab the bugs that flew there. Off in the distance, the trees rattled in a pleasant breeze, almost in time with the rhythmic inhale-exhale of the water hitting the cliffs. That same breeze floated through open windows and filled every hallway with the smell of seawater and blooming things, pretty flowers carried up from the odd outdoor gardens on balconies and woods below. The night was cloudless, and warm, and peaceful. The base of Gibraltar slept.

Jesse did not.

Instead, he woke up about seven minutes past one AM, sweating and shivering, the knife under his pillow gripped in his hand and brandished at absolutely nothing, adrenaline in his veins itching uncomfortably from a cause he already couldn’t remember. When he found the room empty, he sighed.

Angie meant well, he knew, but this damn sleep aid was gonna kill him. It had its perks, sure; he could sleep shorter but feel less tired, which was nice-- something about going directly into REM, she’d said-- but he woke up feeling like absolute horseshit, every day, without fail. Sometimes he got lucky enough to sleep until his alarm, but more often then not, he was up at odd hours of the morning, snacking on protein bars and playing games on his holopad until he fell asleep, or the day began.

If he got bored enough, he’d actually put away his laundry, though, and that made him feel a little better about himself. 

He fell into his usual routine and opened his snack drawer, only to find a note inside reading ‘restock,’written about a week ago, and ignored since, accompanied only by shreds of an empty wrapper, and some crumbs. Dammit. He hauled himself up out of bed, instead, and threw some pants on over his boxers, along with a sports bra under his tee. Not that he really expected to bump into someone at one in the morning, but it was Blackwatch, and it was the kitchen, so the possibility was still a very real one. As per usual, he kept a knife hidden away in his shorts, tucked into a hole he’d cut in the waistband, nestled between the fabric and the elastic inside; a kind of mockery of the sheath on his combat uniform. 

The halls were quiet. Jesse was only in his socks, having forgone his boots due to the wet grass still stuck and drying on the soles, and it made his footsteps oddly silent, even to his ears. The floors of Gibraltar creaked, sure, but only around the walls or the corners, which were easy to avoid when there was no one else to try and accommodate. Outside the windows, he could hear the trees humming along with the wind outside, crickets and night-bugs making noises that made him think of the nights back home. The worst part about waking up this early, he thought, was that it made him so nostalgic. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the soft drone of music downstairs, matching the beat of the creaking wood as his parents danced slow circles in the living room, enjoying a rare moment to themselves while the rest of the house slept. He could snoring from the room beside him, and it was easy to imagine it was someone else’s. If he closed his eyes here, maybe he would dream it was _hers_ , of a time before she left. Before he left, too. Before the world was horrible. Back when all three of them would sneak into one room and watch old cartoons on a shared screen, giggling and shushing each other under an umbrella of blankets so they wouldn’t alert their parents or Raúl. It sounded… real. Like there was really some old film playing, like the TV really was on and spitting out electric noises as televisions do, like there really was another living soul around the halls at this hour.

It sounded like there was someone in the rec room, actually. 

Jesse poked his head into the doorway and saw, curled up on the sofa, lit by the blue light of the TV-- _his little sister_ \-- a child. She looked up. He balked back at the little girl(?), who was most definitely _not_ his sister, thanks; her skin was too dark, hair too straight, face too narrow. His heart still had yet to restart, but that was unimportant. What he really wanted to know, was who’s fucking kid was in the rec room, and why at one AM?

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” the girl said back. 

A beat of silence. “You mind if I make a sandwich, or something?”

She shrugged. “I’m not gonna stop you.”

“Cool.”

He gave her a wide berth as he moved to the refrigerator, pulling out some ham --unexpired, this time-- cheese, and bread. He didn’t really get why the bread kept getting but in the fridge, but whatever. Not like there was a perfectly good bread box on the counter, or anything. 

He had to wash a plate in order to get a clean one, and did so while he waited for his bread to toast, trying to be as quiet as possible not to disturb the movie playing behind him. As always, though, his curiousity got the better of him, and once his sandwich was assembled, he wandered over to the back of the sofa, making his footsteps louder than they needed to be so he wouldn’t spook her.

“Whatcha watchin,’ there, pipsqueak?”

She picked up a DVD case and squinted at it.

“Princess Diaries. Don’t call me pipsqueak, I could beat you in a fight.”

“Fair. Mind if I join ya for a bit?”

She shrugged, and Jesse settled on the couch on the side opposite from her, trying to give her as much space as he could. She didn’t really seem to care.

“Well, you don’t want me to call you pipsqueak, what’re my options?”

“Why do you have to call me anything?”

Jesse raised his hands in surrender, one half of his first sandwich shoveled in his mouth. 

“You don’t wanna talk, I’ll leave you be.”

And so he sat in silence, and they watched The Princess Diaries.

Well, he half-watched The Princess Diaries, and half studied the child on the couch beside him. She must have been at least ten or eleven, but no older than fourteen, if he could guess right; she had gold beads looped into her hair, hanging down around her chin, a hooked nose, and what might have been a tattoo under at least her right eye, from what Jesse could see. There was a look in her eyes that said she was born for life like this, life spent in places like Gibraltar, surrounded by guns and violence and the chain of command. It was a look he saw in Morrison’s eyes, and Reyes’, and Miss Amari’s, and just about every other person in Overwatch he’d met so far. Jesse wasn’t an absolute dipshit. He had a pretty damn good idea whose kid she was. 

But if she didn’t wanna talk, he wasn’t gonna make her. He got it. Sometimes, he just needed to be nobody. He just needed to be a kid, every now and again, and stop feeling like he needed to live up to the expectations of the world around him. Sometimes, he needed to watch The Princess Diaries.

It was only when he got up and took his plate that she spoke.

“Are you making another sandwich?”

“Yeah. You want one?”

“Is there any mayo in the fridge?”

“Yeah, and that’s disgusting. You disgust me.”

“Cool. Make me a sandwich, nerd.”

Jesse snorted. “You got it, boss.”

He finished up both his sandwich and the monstrosity requested of him, and sat down, scooting a slightly-damp plate to his new companion. He should really be a good samaritan and wash the rest of the dishes. He sat down.

“Fareeha,” the girl said, slurring a little around her sandwich.

“What now?”

“Fareeha. That’s my name.”

Jesse mimed tipping his hat. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Fareeha. I’m--”

She wrinkled her nose. “I know who you are. You’re that guy my mom keeps training.”

He blinked at her.

“Uh, yeah, actually, I am.”

“She says you won’t stop calling her ‘Miss,’ either.”

“Oh.” He scratched at his jaw. “Should I stop?”

“With her? No. She likes it for her ego.” She smiled as she said it, which made Jesse think it wasn’t in poor spirit. “But if you call me ‘Miss,’ I’ll beat you up.”

He nodded. “Duly noted.”

Fareeha gave him an odd look. “I _can_ beat you up,” she stressed.

“Oh, I got no doubt about it. If you’re Miss Amari’s girl, You could wipe my sorry ass off the continent.”

She sat up a little straighter, grinning a little as she shoved her sandwich into her mouth.

“Damn right I could,” she mumbled, barely audible. Jesse had a feeling she wasn’t supposed to be swearing, if the way Miss Amari swatted him upside the head for doing it was any indication. She said to get in the habit of not swearing in front of your elders, to which Jesse had batted his eyes and told her it was an honest mistake, since she didn’t look a day over twenty. She’d laughed at that, and proceeded to make him run laps.

“I don’t actually remember you name, though,” Fareeha said.

“Jesse Mccree,” he drawled, bending half over his middle in a little bow.

She snorted. “That’s so cheesy.”

He shrugged, grinning back at her. “Hey, whatever works.”

On the screen, something important was happening, but Jesse hadn’t followed the plot well enough to know what it was.

“Why are you in here?” Fareeha asked.

“The kitchen? Just wanted a sandwich. You want me to leave ya alone?”

“No. I actually want to know why you’re in here.”

Jesse shoved the last of his third sandwich into his mouth.

“I was hungry,” he slurred.

She frowned at him, face a little odd. Something he couldn’t quite read, which made him a little anxious. “Hmm.”

Jesse picked up her empty plate and fit it under his, grasping both between his hands as he stood.

“Nightmares.”

Fareeha was quiet for the long moment where Jesse washed their plates again and set them to dry before plopping back down on the couch. 

“Me too,” she sighed.

If he were someone else, he might have said she was too young to be having nightmares. But Jesse’d seen his fair share of bodies by the time he was about her age. He’d made his fair share, too. 

“I’m lucky enough not to remember mine. Just wake up a damn mess.” He paused. “I know lots of ‘em are about my folks, though. Terrified something’s gonna happen to ‘em.”

Fareeha nodded. “I dream my mom just… disappears somewhere, a lot. She just doesn’t come back and I can’t find her, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jesse whispered. “I know.”

Beside him, Fareeha drew her knees up to her chest, and Jesse did the same.

He really did get where she was coming from. Miss Amari lived a dangerous life, one that could have her dropping off the face of the planet any day. She got an odd look in her eyes, sometimes, when she saw Jesse take down sim targets; she had ever since he came back from Canada. Everyone’d heard the story about the mission, because every heard every story, about every mission, but Miss Amari looked at him different, afterwards. Like she was a little sad. She’d been a whole lot more distant, since, and it hadn’t done wonders for Jesse’s general health or self esteem. He looked up to her, and now she looked at him as if he frightened her, sometimes. He supposed to was just the nature of himself, though, that he scared people off. 

Idowu asked him, once, if he’d felt bad, or hesitated back in the warehouse, even though the look on his face said he already knew the answer. Jesse told him he didn’t, and Idowu had acted the same as Miss Amari did when he made a particularly brutal shot. 

He understood, though. Didn’t hold it against them. 

Miss Amari was just a little world-weary, he thought, not so hellbent on fighting like Jesse was. She didn’t want to disappear, but she knew she might. And so did Fareeha. It wasn’t assured the way it was for Jesse, or Soares, or any of the other field agents. They knew they wouldn’t come back, someday, and so they weren’t scared to see each other go. Nakano and Defranco never told each other to come home, when they went on separate missions; it was always ‘good luck, I love you,’ echoed like a mantra around the vehicle bay as everyone saw their friends off on a mission that, someday, they wouldn’t return from. 

Miss Amari might survive. She might not. And it was the suspense that was so much worse, in Jesse’s opinion. 

For a long time, neither of them said a word. He watched as, a few times, Fareeha scrubbed at her eyes or sniffled, and he had to fight hard not to do the same. As it was, he had to blink a whole lot more than necessary to keep tears from falling down his cheeks.

“I’m thirteen,” she rasped, as if it explained something. And it did, really. It made her more real, made the tears on her face feel more appropriate. Made it that much more tragic that she was already hurting the way she was. An admittance; a weakness delivered in a piece of knowledge that might have been meaningless, otherwise. Fareeha Amari was thirteen, and she had nightmares about her mother dying and leaving her behind, and she couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t like to be called ‘Miss,’ or ‘pipsqueak,’ and she liked mayonnaise, and The Princess Diaries-- but then again, who didn’t-- and she was just a little girl.

“I’m eighteen.”

She looked at him, with wide, gaping eyes, frowning. He could see the same emotions move over her face, too. He was just a teenager. 

“That’s not allowed,” she murmured, and she sounded genuinely _angry_ about it, as if someone had wronged him by putting him here, when in reality, it was the best thing that happened to him in a long while. Still, her face said the same thing his did when he looked at her. He was just a teenager. He shouldn’t be like this.

“I know. Reyes already gave me the rundown on that one.”

She wiped her face again, turning toward him completely, unfolding her knees to cross them beneath her. 

“You can’t stay a field agent, right? What are you gonna do?”

He shrugged. Fareeha tipped her head one way, then another, and Jesse could understand what she was doing, just trying to move on the conversation into something she knew; she was a strategist, apparently, just like Reyes and Miss Amari, but that wasn’t exactly surprising. And he didn’t mind, not really. Neither of them would get anywhere from having a pity party, and it seemed they were in agreement on that much.

“Dunno. Was thinkin’ maybe I could go stationary, for a while. Got some good friends there.” He glanced at her to make sure she actually understood what he was saying, and she nodded. 

“You don’t really want that, though, do you?”

He snorted. “Now what gives you that idea?”

She grinned, but it was still a little watery.

“My mom likes to tell stories about you. She says you remind her of uncle Gabe. And he’s not really a ‘stationary’ guy.”

_He’s not really a ‘might die,’ either._

“You’re too smart for your own good, kid, you know that? You’re not careful, you’ll end up like me, someday.”

“Dressing like a cowboy?”

“A delinquent. But yeah, that too.”

She punched him in the arm, but not hard. It still kind of stung, though.

“Whatever, loser.” Her face went focused again, brow furrowed like she was trying to work through a puzzle. Reminded him a little of Angie. “You can just leave for a while, right? Why wouldn’t you do that?”

“And do what? Wander around ass-nowhere for the next four years?”

She shrugged. “You could see cool stuff.”

“I could see _cooler_ stuff if I was an agent,” he whined. 

Fareeha tugged at the beads on her hair for a moment before she snapped her fingers, pointing at him.

“Ask my mom to adopt you. She’d probably do it, if you got her something nice enough. There’s a tea place in town she likes. That and a box of chocolates, you’re in. Getting her to sign you off on field work would be a lot harder, though.”

He balked at her. Fareeha suggested he get adopted… by her mom. She said it like that really wouldn’t bother her, either. As if Jesse could just walk up to Miss Amari, get swooped into her family, and Fareeha wouldn’t bat an eye. He wondered if Miss Amari did that often. Maybe it wasn’t so uncommon, after all. But while the Amaris might not have an issue with it, if he was being honest, Jesse did. Miss Amari was great, and all, but she… she was just that. She was Miss Amari. And Fareeha was great, too, don’t get him wrong, but he’d met her about an _hour_ ago. Even if they shared some mutual pity and teenaged angst, it was still an hour. The fact that she suggested it at all threw him for a little of a loop. 

Maybe he was taking it too seriously, but the whole matter felt a lot more important than Fareeha made it sound. In the grand scheme of things, it might not have been a big deal, just another name on some paperwork to keep some lawyer from bothering Reyes, but to Jesse it felt like something momentous. Not something he just asked on a whim with some tea and chocolates.

It was like he said; Miss Amari was nice, and all, but… she wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t his father. She wasn’t Raúl. Nothing like them, really. She made him feel safer than most people, but. Asking someone to adopt him kind of seemed like a thing he’d ask an old family friend, or something. And he didn’t have any of those on hand. He’d pushed the whole idea out of his head, if he was being honest. Wasn’t all that keen on it, the idea of leaving his family behind for another just for his own gain.

Fareeha seemed to pick up on that, though, and she shrugged.

“You could talk to your _parents_ , parents,” she suggested.

Jesse cringed.

“I mean. If they’re not dead or trying to kill you.”

He cringed harder. They were neither, and that almost made it worse. 

“I can’t help you if you don’t want to listen to my ideas,” she grunted, and it sounded a whole lot like her mother. He flashed her a sheepish grin.

“Think for now, I’ll just stick with that stationary idea.”

“Hmm. Whatever you say, cowboy.” And she turned back to the film, where something else entirely unintelligible to him was happening. He did the same, folding a blanket over his knees and crossing his ankles on the coffee table.

Being a stationary might not be _awful,_ he reasoned, especially if it was just for a while. He’d still be a part of Blackwatch, just. A different part. With no guns. And paperwork. 

He should ask Mina more about it, sometime. He hadn’t, yet, because he didn’t want to bother her, but it had been some time since they talked, and he missed her. She reminded him a lot of Kaufman, the same kind of quiet diligence, just focused into different things. She seemed happy, though, despite the work she did. Jesse thought it sounded like a whole lot of drudgery, but if she and Ezra could make it work, so could he, for a little while. 

He absently looked around at nothing while he thought, watching Fareeha stare a little blankly at the TV, focused on something invisible and yawning occasionally. Jesse dropped a pillow on his lap. 

Less than ten minutes later, Fareeha yawned again.

“I’m gonna sleep on you,” she grunted, and he didn’t stop her as she flopped over and dropped her head on the pillow overtop his legs, closing her eyes and starting to snore only seconds later. Jesse hooked his arms over the back of the sofa and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. 

Talking to Fareeha was a little like talking to his own sister, but it wasn’t the same. Nothing was, because there was no one like her, obviously, but it was still nice to hear from someone about his own age that wasn’t Angie. Not that he didn’t love Angie to death, but it was nice to have more than one person to talk to. 

And while his teammates were great people, he was probably going to be seeing less of them, in the future, so there was that to keep in mind, too. 

He rolled his ideas over in his head, letting the credits of The Princess DIaries play along the screen. 

If he stayed a stationary, he could at least stay with his friends. Then again, maybe he’d get moved somewhere else. He hoped not. If he had to stay off the field for a while, he wanted to have fun stories to listen to until he could join them, at least. Idowu and Robin were both good storytellers, each dramatic in their own right; Alvarado delivered stories as they were, Maksimovich embellished, but mostly with more swearing, and Nakano and Defranco just told two wildly different accounts everyone else had to try and piece together while the two of them wrestled on the floor. Montreal and Kaufman weren’t much of storytellers, but Kaufman was a mean fact-checker when she needed to be. It made for very, very fun nighttime horror stories. 

And if he stayed a stationary, he could still train. Could still shoot when he wanted, could practice his fighting moves and spar on the mats, could bust his knuckles doing something stupid, could still try and navigate Athena’s generated obstacle courses to get his blood going. Spending a few years in Numbani would be nice, but Numbani was nothing compared to the frenzy of Gibraltar. He fell for the frenzy, in the beginning; the loud shrieks of the people crowding against the door as Reyes dragged him into the mess for the first time, the chaotic, boisterous affair of the paintball game, the lewd jokes shared between them all as they sat around the fire in Canada. He wanted to be a part of Blackwatch, he really, really did. He supposed, if that meant waiting, then he could wait. 

Fareeha twitched in her sleep, and Jesse absently brushed a hand through her hair, same as he did for his own sister. She’d been waiting for something her whole life; he saw it in the way she held herself, how hungry she was to solve problems, her desire to be formidable, rather than ‘Miss Amari’s baby girl,’ the calculating harshness in her eyes while she tried to bend the future with her own hands. She was a lot like his little sister. And if she could wait as long as she had, four years doing paperwork wouldn’t kill him. 

He was going to be Jesse Mccree: Blackwatch Stationary, and he was going to be fucking great at his job. Hopefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i absolutely love hearin from you guys youre wonderful and thank u so much for sticking w me through that hiatus, im gonna try to be better in the future !!!!! that one emoji where it had steam out of its nose
> 
> thanks as always for reading !!!!


	24. 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UHHHHH ANOTHER MISSION BC IM? EXTRA
> 
> **warning for descriptions of injuries and gore!!**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the hiatus everyone, i was overseas for a bit n recently lost someone in the family
> 
> but!! i tried to make up for it with a bit longer chapter than usual n ive already got the beginning of the next chap goin ! thanks a bunch for all your patience!!!

“Stop dicking around, Mccree, we’ve got wheels up in ten.”

Jesse flashed a grin at Reyes from where he stood outside the carrier, idly bantering back and forth with Nakano and Defranco, who had come with a gaggle of other agents to see off the group that were deploying. 

“You got it, pops.” 

He ducked under Reyes’ arm before he could cuff Jesse upside the head.

“At least _act_ professional, for fuck’s sake.”

Jesse turned and shrugged as he walked backwards into the plane, spinning around once as he crossed the threshold to come stand by Soares, who still reeked like fresh cigar smoke. 

“Someone’s excited,” Robin remarked, hands neatly steepled on the table overtop the hand Kaufman had just dealt to him, Alvarado, and Maksimovich. Idowu stood over Maksimovich’s shoulder, peering at her deck with his chin resting on her head, though he had to bend nearly in half to reach her sitting down. It wasn’t that Maksimovich was a small person, by any means, but that Idowu was a very tall one.

“Hell yeah I am,” Jesse shot back. “Y’all have any idea how long I was benched?” 

“Gotta thank your daddy for getting you out of that one, huh?” Idowu leered, at the same moment Reyes stepped into the plane in full, the door slowly shutting behind him.

“None of you can call me that, ever,” he groaned, spurring a cackle from Soares, who bared her teeth at him in what was almost considerable as a grin. “I never want to hear that word again in my entire fucking life.”

“Mccree started it!” 

“Yeah, and I’ll finish it. I have a shotgun.” To prove his point, Reyes popped a spare shell from his weapons harness and pointedly brandished it at the rest of the room. 

Jesse drifted over to the card table as Reyes took up the spot of Soares’ left, quietly chattering with her in a language Jesse didn’t know. 

“I want to put ten on Max,” Idowu said, and Kaufman made a note on the sheet of paper beside her.

“Idowu, dear, you still owe me money,” Robin pointed out, and Kaufman seemed to take note of that, too.

“How are you already in debt?” Maksimovich craned her head upward to look at Idowu where he stood above her, shrugging.

“I really thought Mccree was like, twenty three.”

She turned to Jesse. “Wait, was that still supposed to be a secret?”

He shrugged.

“Anyways. Idowu, he was five foot six when we met him, and he grew three inches since then. How do you not put two and two together?” 

“It wasn’t my business! If I grew another three inches, would you ask?” 

“Fucking, yeah I would. Who grows three inches in their twenties? Also, if by some miracle, I didn’t notice, you’d still be wearing capris all the time, and I’d want to know your supplier.”

Idowu muttered something under his breath, dropping his head on his arms where they were crossed over Maksimovich’s hair.

Jesse hopped into the card game after a few rounds, both to see if he could manage to win something, and to see if he could catch everyone else cheating, as they all most definitely were. It became a game as much as the cards were, as they shifted from poker into uno, that if you were caught cheating, it was an immediate draw four. He caught Alvarado trying to slide a card into his sleeve, Maksimovich got Robin when he tucked a card into the neck of his uniform under the guise of arranging his hair, and Idowu got Jesse trying to put down two cards at a time.

The flight was only a few hours long, taking them from Gibraltar to some place in the middle of Czech, where another gang was causing trouble outside of a little town. It wouldn’t have been such a high-caliber operation, except for the fact that the gang had taken up shelter in an old bunker that, officially, didn’t exist, and had come across a whole lot more firepower than they really should have. They were running odd shipments, like guns and ammunition, body armor, and most notably, actual scientific equipment, but none of said armaments had been seen since they arrived. The information they had now was courtesy of the Blackwatch scouts who had gone to investigate after the locals had filed a complaint. The scouts reported that the doors, at least, were operated by means of ID card clearances, another tech most small-scale gangs-- like this one-- rarely had access to. The mission was relatively simple, and similar to that in Canada: secure the base. How they did it was more up to Reyes, who divvied them up into groups with specific tasks to each of them. Jesse was with Reyes, Soares, Alvarado, Maksimovich, and Idowu, whose job it was to keep the gang members busy while Robin and Kaufman wormed their way into higher access areas to open a path for the rest of them to follow.

Jesse was more than happy to be allowed back into the field, he really was, but he felt… guilty, for why he was there. A week after he’d met Fareeha, Reyes offered to take him in, and after a while of deliberating, he’d accepted, signed the paperwork, had a heartfelt discussion about loyalties that made him think Reyes knew more about Jesse’s family than he let on, and Gabriel Reyes became his actual, legal guardian. As in, Gabriel Reyes, the guy who fought in the original strike team (of which Jesse now knew _four_ ), was one of the instrumental forces in stopping the Omnic Crisis, led Blackwatch as its commander, and was probably the deadliest person Jesse would ever meet in his life.

He was grateful, sure, but a part of him resented Reyes for asking. He felt a little like he’d done something wrong, or committed some act of betrayal, despite the fact that he hadn’t really done a thing. It still made Jesse feel sour inside, guilty in a way he could ignore up until he tried to sleep at night. The news spread fast, in Blackwatch, faster than it could be clamped down on, though that was expected, given the nature of the people that were in it. The leak actually came from Angie, who didn’t realise she’d done it; a field agent named Rody had come in for a nasty gunshot wound, and asked Angie if she knew why Jesse was being allowed back on the field-- there were only about two-hundred Blackwatch field agents in Gibraltar, after all, so most everyone knew most everything about most everyone else-- to which Angie had answered honestly, telling Rody that Reyes had stepped in for Jesse, and the news was out within the day. 

The teasing came soon after, but that was to be expected, and it was far nicer than the jibes Jesse was used to, anyway, so he didn’t mind so much. He learned fast in Deadlock that if he was hurt by what people said, it would keep happening. So instead, he flourished under it. He was sure if he mentioned to someone that it bothered him, that would spread too, and the jokes would probably stop, but that was Blackwatch. He doubted everyone would be so kind. They never were. So, he played it up, instead. He rolled along with the jokes and jabs, started doing dumb shit, like calling Reyes ‘pops,’ half to give him a hard time, and half to hide the fact that every dad joke someone made had Jesse wanting to shoot off his own foot. He even went so far as to get ‘Reyes’ hyphenated and stuck on his door. 

But Reyes hadn’t shot him yet, so Jesse assumed it was fine. 

Other than that, the last few weeks had been relatively uninteresting; more training, more time with Miss Amari, and so on. He was pretty sure he could reload and fire off just about every weapon known to man, at this point, but shooting targets was nothing like being in a real firefight. He was antsy and excited, happy to be back up and moving, but he wasn’t an idiot. The thought of being around live fire made the rational, animal part of his brain nervous, made him feel too-sweaty and anxious, picking at the acne on his face and unloading-reloading his guns while they sat and waited for the plane to land.

The pilot up front announced when they were about another hour out, and it was then that the rest of the carrier started to get restless, too; Soares’ fingers twitched as she rolled an unlit cigar between her teeth, pacing like a caged carnivore, skimming her weapons harness for every knife and other deadly thing on her person. Robin braided, undid, and braided his hair again, no less than three times before he was satisfied enough to pin it against the back of his head. Maksimovich got snappy with Idowu, who bounced his leg against the floor and went over the sights on his gun about a dozen times, Kaufman sitting at the table beside them and counting out her bullets over and over. Reyes chewed on the inside of his mouth, staring at nothing and only moving to work his jaw or wipe blood from his lips. Alvarado sat in one of the corners and quietly counted over a rosary. 

“Everyone clear on the plan?” Reyes asked.

A chorus of ‘yeah, boss,’ ‘sí, jefe,’ and other affirmatives followed.

“Idowu, what’s your job?”

“I’m, uh. I’m at the door, with Robin, to do suppressing fire until he and Kaufman can get in.”

“Good. Alvarado?”

“Second line with Maksimovich, taking out stragglers and on standby for support.”

“Mccree?”

“Front line with you and Soares, stayin’ out of the way and chasing anyone who tries to flank us or get around the choke point.”

“Kaufman?”

“With Mccree, waiting for Robin’s signal.”

Reyes glanced over to Robin, who sat neatly poised on the couch, testing the integrity of each of his knives by running them against the edge of the table, leaving little uniform ruts in the wood. He looked up and met Reyes’ eyes, stowing a blade in the sheath on his shoulder and pulling a pair of high gloves over his uniform. They exchanged a brief nod, and Reyes moved on. Maksimovich rolled her shoulders where she sat, running her fingers over the spare clips of ammunition that were strapped over her chest. She gave Reyes a similar look, and he turned to Soares, whose grin looked ready to split her face in two. 

“You know the rules. Think, be safe. Don’t do anything stupid.” The last part he directed at Jesse, who laid a hand over his chest in mock offense. “Stay on the comms at all times, unless I say otherwise. Good luck.”

“I love you,” echoed Soares, Alvarado, and Robin in unison, looking to one another, then to Reyes again. From the corner of his eye, Jesse could see Alvarado and Robin briefly link their hands at their sides, and he glanced away, feeling like he was intruding on something private. 

“Ready up. We drop in T-minus fifteen.”

Jesse took up his position on Reyes’ side, the one not occupied by Soares, and once more counted the bullets in his gun, inhaling deep through his nose and out his mouth. Twelve rounds in the chamber. Count on two bullets for each target, just in case. Aim for six. Make all of them in one, then aim for three. Reload. Always save the last bullet in the last clip. Never hesitate. 

The doors of the carrier opened, and eight Blackwatch agents spilled out, moving with the rattle of wind through the trees, working under the guidance of the moonlight up above. They landed back behind the hills so that the base wouldn’t hear them coming, used the dark sky above to make sure they wouldn’t be seen. 

When they came to the entry point, two guards were standing at the front door, lazily holding rifles in their hands and occasionally yawning. Robin and Soares exchanged a glance, then split off in opposite directions, slinking up around and behind the guards while Jesse crouched with the others in the foliage nearby. He could just barely make out Robin from where he sat, watched him count down on his fingers: three, two, one, before he and Soares both erupted from the dark and mashed a hand over a guard’s mouth, both drawing a blade and splitting their throats, almost perfectly in sync. Jesse watched the blood fly through the air against the shrubby bushes around the entrance, turned white by the moon. The two bodies were drug into the shadows, and Soares signalled for the rest of them to advance. 

Robin managed to palm off both guards’ access cards-- one level three and one level two, as identified by the neatly printed numbers on the holographic square-- and he took up his position against the door while he waited for the rest of them to get into position. All around Jesse, safeties were switched off, clips were double checked, and knives were accounted for, the only sound among eight people being shaky, adrenaline-heavy breathing. 

“Everyone ready?” Reyes asked, and upon receiving nothing but silence, he nodded. “Breaching in three, two, one.”

The doors split open as soon as the access card was drawn over the sensor, stowed somewhere on Robin’s person as he and Idowu sighted their guns while the rest of first and second line advanced, Alvarado diving down behind a metal crate near Maksimovich’s feet as her gun spun up. Jesse and Kaufman darted into the shadows as soon as the doors came apart, relying on the dark to hide them from view. As if every eye in the building hadn’t turned to them already, Soares bared her teeth and screamed, the sound bouncing and echoing off metal walls like some horrible accompaniment to the pitching growl of Maksimovich’s gun revving up to fire. 

And the bullets started to fly.

They had the element of surprise, which gave most, if not all of them time to get at least one shot off, and offered Maksimovich the precious moments to get her gun ready to shoot and start laying down covering fire. Like ants after stepping on a hill, the gang members scattered without any sense of rhyme or reason, each throwing themselves behind any source of cover they could in an attempt to save their own asses. They had no strategy to cover one another, which made it easy for Idowu and Robin to pick them off from behind the doors while Reyes and Soares tore through their barricades, getting behind their defensive line and laying waste to anyone unlucky enough to be in their way. Jesse took off after a desperate woman scrambling to the left, trying to find a place to hide herself in the metal shipping containers that littered the room. She didn’t even see him when he fired off a shot, catching her square in the head and dropping her to the floor with an ugly thud. He briefly searched her for a card, came up with a level two clearance, and dropped it in his pocket, winding his way deeper into the crates and finding a clutch of people hiding behind a box, all faced away from him and firing at Maksimovich, who had deployed a half-shell drop shield before she started shooting, effectively making herself into an armored turret as she mowed down anyone dumb enough to come out of cover.  
Jesse noted the number of bullets left in his gun; eleven, enough for five targets, plenty for the four standing before him, and he managed to take down two of them with shots to the head before the others even turned around. The third only managed to look at him before he caught them between the eyes, but the fourth was a little more difficult. In the time it took Jesse to nail their compatriots, they’d managed to turn around, spraying bullets at him in a wild arc, not having taken their finger off the trigger since they turned to face him. He dove behind the crates as they shouted something in Czech, and he waited for them to expend their clip before he reappeared. They were too untrained, too frantic to think about rationing ammo, but Jesse banked on that as he rolled from cover during a lapse in fire and sent two bullets flying, one catching the shooter in the shoulder, and the other straight through the chest. They pitched forward, gun clattering to the floor, and Jesse snatched it up before they could fully register the shock of being hit, finishing their reload and shooting them in the head, just to be sure. He now had six rounds in his pistol, and a mostly-full automatic clip to spend, as well as a handful of shiny access cards. 

He sprinted back to his post by the door, whistling to get Alvarado’s attention, and proceeded to slide him the automatic rifle across the floor, receiving a grateful nod in response.

“I got a level four card,” he said into the comms, and heard Soares whistle back. 

“Patito’s moving up in the world,” she crowed, breathless and raspy, though Jesse could hear her smile in her voice.

“I’ve already secured a level five,” Kaufman politely informed him, and Jesse loosed a dramatic sigh into the mic.

“Kaufman, putting us all to shame,” after a moment of silence, he added a quiet “I’m joking.” 

“Oh. Thank you.”

Jesse counted over his bullets again, briefly engaging the targeting system in his eye to see if there were any shooters Maksimovich would need help getting to. 

Idowu saw the gunner perched above the crates at the same time Jesse did, still trying to adjust and just lowering their head to their sights.

“Sniper, up on the left!”

Jesse probably had about two or three seconds before they’d be able to line up cleanly, especially with everyone diving behind cover. He could aim in that time, probably. Maksimovich was still keeping the majority that remained occupied, so he rolled out into the open space and, half standing, he forced the targeting system back online despite the pinch of pain it sent through his head, and had his pistol moving into position before the target even appeared. Aim on the inhale, fire on the exhale. 

The pistol in his hand jerked as it fired, but he’d accounted for that when he aimed, knowing he’d be aiming one-handed, anyway, not enough time to get his left under the butt of the gun to steady it before he was lined up. It had been a while since he tried to make a shot like this one on a person, rather than a line of cans or a sim target. Getting out of cover like this wasn’t a move Jesse was particularly fond of, but Soares and Reyes were still out and moving, and they, as well as Maksimovich, would be easy picking for the sniper. 

He knew he was going to make the shot from the second he felt the bullet leave the chamber. The shock rumbled up his arm and spiked his heart, lighting up his veins with so much adrenaline he felt like he could fly. 

As promised, the sniper’s head jerked back, and they slumped over their rifle a moment later, dead. 

“Sniper’s taken care of,” Jesse gasped, breathless, ducking his way into the shadows again, a dizzy grin on his face.

“I saw you get hit, Mccree, give me a damage report,” Alvarado said, and Jesse awkwardly patted himself down for a moment before finding the wet spot on his uniform, but a brief look revealed it to be nothing more than a graze, less than an inch deep.

“Just nicked my left arm. I’m alright.”

He was more than alright, really, high on endorphins with his heartbeat roaring in his ears, making him feel dangerously invincible and frighteningly violent. It was such a raw, Deadlock-esque emotion that it had Jesse reeling momentarily, distantly disgusted with himself. More presently, though, he was feeling prideful, lucky, and confident-- and while he knew he had a right to be proud of his abilities, his pride made the sensible and instinctive part of his brain writhe with unease like a worm squirming to escape the sun-- which meant he was about to do something dumb as shit. 

The opportunity presented itself in the figure of a stocky woman fleeing from the spring of carnage Reyes was tearing into, one hand clutched to a bleeding shoulder; a wounded animal, and Jesse had no preoccupations with the honors of chasing her while she was already down. 

He took off after her, coming to flank her through the maze of shipping containers and finding her mid-reload and scavenging ammunition off a corpse beside her. Jesse caught her in his sights and went to squeeze the trigger, only for her to look up, a frighteningly Soares-like bloody grin on her face, and it was then he noted the gun held in her left hand, hidden behind the curve of her crouching body and aimed squarely at Jesse.

He dropped to the floor without a second thought, the bullet whizzing through the space he’d occupied only a second before, and he hurled his body sideways, rolling back behind cover as another round shattered the concrete where he’d lay. 

He leaned around the edge and fired at her, but she was already gone from her previous spot, weaving behind the boxes and out of view. Jesse gave chase, getting to his feet and tearing after her, his gun up and ready. He came around another blind corner, but this time, he heaved a body beside him into the lane, hoping it would act as a suitable decoy before diving into view. His face was spattered with blood and bone as the woman cleanly fired through the dead man’s head without hesitating, and that was when Jesse began to understand the mistake he’d made. This woman wasn’t like the others. She was like Jesse. She was smart, and she was _competent._

He fired at her again, if only to prevent her from wasting him right then and there, making the number of bullets in his gun tick down to three, and he threw himself behind a nearby crate, exhaling shaky. 

“Think I’m gonna need backup, here,” he gasped into the comm. “This one’s actually a good shot.”

He didn’t hear the affirmative from his team, too busy getting up and moving again, hot on the woman’s heels as she wound about the floor, coming to a rickety-looking catwalk hanging above them, beaten by years of overuse, then disuse, partly rusty and bowing under its own weight. Regardless to the catwalk’s state, the woman took the stairs up two at a time, spraying the floor near Jesse with automatic fire to keep him from taking a shot at her. He followed, keeping his body low, the worm in his head shrieking every time the catwalk creaked and rattled below his feet. 

Hubris came in the form of a misplaced step, the metal beneath him too thin to support his weight, rust buckling and crumpling around his foot, plunging it straight through the catwalk to hang in open air and laying Jesse flat on his stomach, the breath violently wrenched from his lungs. 

The woman ducked behind a wooden crate stowed on the walk with them on instinct, hiding herself from a gunshot that hadn’t been fired. Jesse had seconds, at best, to get himself up and moving again, or he’d be a sitting duck before the freshly-loaded automatic in the woman’s left hand. An experimental yank did nothing to dislodge him, poking painfully into the fabric of his uniform, having punched through in some places as he fell. The rattle of the metal as he struggled alerted the woman to his downed state, though, and she barely peered over her crate, firing a shot of her pistol just inches from Jesse’s head. He returned the shot, actually managing to catch her hair, but not her skull, and she dove back down again. 

This time when he tried to free himself, Jesse bit his lip and yanked hard, hesitating for only a moment when he felt metal bite through his uniform and into his skin. He didn’t give himself a chance to register that, though, before he heaved himself upright, unable to stop the furious, pained scream that tore from his throat with the motion. His leg felt like it had been set on fire, brown skin visible between shredded fabric even from his peripheries. The woman turned around to face him, and Jesse sprung from his staggered crouch toward her, forcing himself through the two paces to reach her and snatch her wrists before she could aim her gun. In his ear, a slurry of voices were shouting at him to report, but he was a little too preoccupied to care, at that given moment. 

He and the gang member staggered backwards, Jesse hauling his injured knee upward to smash into her pelvic bone, spurring a pained noise from them both as she doubled over and slackened her grip on the automatic in her left hand. He didn’t hesitate to take advantage, slamming his forehead into the bloody spot on her shoulder, making the gun slip from her grasp completely and bowling them both over, taking her precious split-second of surprise and using it to abandon her wrist for the knife at his hip. The knife came down hard on her throat, cutting through her shirt and stopping just hairs away from her skin as she locked Jesse’s wrists in an iron grip, forcing his arms upward and and away, hauling them both over so it was Jesse who was pinned, using the advantage of her weight and strength against his to wrestle the knife from his hands and try to plunge it into the soft tissue under his chin.

He used his free hand to deck her across the face, hearing an ugly pop as her nose broke and started dumping blood over them both, but throwing off her aim enough to have the knife hit metal rather than flesh, the impact jarring it from her hand and sending it spinning across the floor. 

“I’m gonna kill you,” she snarled, blood flying from her lips from where it had dripped down from her nose, spattering Jesse’s face and he curled his lip in disgust. 

“Your mama never teach you to talk with your mouth full?” he shot back, and promptly slammed his forehead into her teeth, taking the opportunity to flip them over again, the catwalk shrieking under the stress of being treated so roughly. Jesse yanked his hands from her grip and instead closed them around her neck, pressing down with all his weight and squeezing as hard as his strength would allow.

The woman gaped like a grounded fish for a moment before reaching up and trying to rake her fingernails down his face, cheeks turning red from lack of oxygen. When she couldn’t find purchase, she grabbed instead at his shoulders, using her legs to force herself half-upright and rolling them again. 

When she and Jesse hit the railing, the metal gave a truly nightmarish groan as it bowed outward, and the two of them exchanged a split-second, horrified glance as it gave in and buckled completely. Jesse used that split second to get his feet underneath her and he pushed with everything he had, letting go of her throat in the same motion and pitching her sideways, making her tumble over the edge. She wouldn’t let him go so easily. Her fist caught his injured foot as she went over, wrenching a shout from his throat and dragging him over the edge, Jesse desperately clawing at the catwalk floor in an attempt to find a handhold to save himself. The effort was in vain, and he was dropped into freefall with her, frantically trying to right himself in midair. He succeeded only in turning on his side before they both hit the ground, the woman flat on her back and Jesse, striking lucky yet again, landing square on her chest, cushioning the blow by a fraction. 

He felt, more than heard his ribs snap beneath him, choking on the breath in his lungs as the pain hit him like a sledgehammer to the head, rendering him motionless atop the semifunctional safety-mattress of the woman below. She had yet to move, but a brief glance at her face showed her eyes rolled back into her head, blood beginning to pool from under her. If she wasn’t dead, she was severely concussed, and either way meant she wasn’t getting up anytime soon, which was fine by Jesse. After a moment of fighting the urge to black out, he slowly came back to his senses, the sound of Reyes screaming in his ear becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the longer he lay there.

“Did anyone see where he went? For fuck’s sake, Mccree, if you got yourself killed the second I let you back on the field--” 

Jesse forced himself to roll over, crawling off the woman’s corpse(?) and making a valiant effort to stay on his hands and knees without passing out. Broken ribs fucking sucked, but they weren’t deadly, so long as he was careful. He’d taken worse. 

“Ow.”

“Mccree?” Reyes was speaking again, sounding like he’d just been on a light jog, rather than slaughtering about two dozen people. “Where are you? Are you hurt? Soares is coming to get you, but she needs your location.”

“What happened?” Idowu came in next, voice shaky. “Is he okay? Are you okay?” 

Jesse clumsily rooted through his lifesaver’s pockets, coming up with a level seven access card-- he sure as hell deserved one-- and using the stacked wooden boxes against the wall to heave himself upright, teeth clenched, wheezing low and shallow in an attempt not to jostle his ribs. His shoulder hurt, too, when he landed on it, but the pain in his side made it impossible for him to tell if it was dislocated, broken, or just very, very bruised. 

“I won. Don’t go on the catwalks.”

“That was _you_?” Idowu gasped. “You weren’t the one who got impaled, right?” 

“Yeah, that was me--”

Reyes and Alvarado spoke at once, similarly pitchy and breaking in the middle.

“ _What_?”

“No, I mean. Yeah Idowu, that was me on the catwalk, but, uh. No, I ain’t the one who got impaled.” He wasn’t sure who, exactly, had been impaled or by what, but he wasn’t too distressed by his ignorance of the situation.

“Can you give me a damage report?” Alvarado asked.

“You’re on the catwalk? Soares--”

“On it, jefe.” 

Jesse leaned back against a crate, slowly and painfully counting his bullets yet again, before shakily aiming the pistol and firing a shot into the woman’s head, painting the concrete in a hideous red spray, just to be safe.

“Uh. Fucked up my leg pretty good--the right one-- and I got at least a few broken ribs on my, uh, left side. Might’a knocked my shoulder out of place, I can’t tell.” He grinned. “Got a level seven access card, though.”

It was at that moment that Soares tore around the corner, Jesse raising his gun and aiming it squarely at her head as she did the same to him, both freezing where they stood and exchanging a brief moment of tense silence before the recognition kicked in and weapons were lowered. 

“Found him,” she barked into the comm.

“He look like he’s dying?”

Soares came up beside Jesse and heaved his arm over her shoulders without asking, bracing her hand on his hip rather than his side, a fact for which he was grateful. 

She snorted.

“Not even close.”

She adjusted her hold on him, ejecting the magazine on her automatic and replacing it with one hooked to her harness.

“Good. Think you can get him out here alive?”

She flashed Jesse a sharklike grin.

“No promises.” 

Half-dragging him with how fast she was moving, she hauled them both out of the crates via a different path than the one Jesse’d come in, working to the rendezvous point, which had moved since their initial breach. Maksimovich was once again stationed behind a drop shield and tearing apart the gang members who leaned out of cover to try and shoot at she and Idowu, who had taken up residence on her side, face pressed to the scope of his rifle. Robin was tucked behind their makeshift barricade as he reloaded, and Jesse could barely make out the top of Alvarado’s head behind Maksimovich’s legs. Soares shifted Jesse on her shoulder again before flexing her fingers on the grip of her automatic, the white-blue silicon of her arm splattered and stained with red. She nodded to the gun loosely held in Jesse’s grip.

“Start shooting, Reyes.”

The address caught him off guard momentarily, but being yanked out from behind cover and into live fire knocked him out of it quick enough; he reloaded his pistol the same as Soares had done, as much as leaving a bullet behind caused him anxiety, but he didn’t stop to dwell on it, lighting his targeting system and taking up aim on the targets that burst into view. 

He used the pain as a means of focusing, shutting down the world to nothing but awareness of his body-- his hand would twitch halfway through an exhale, an involuntary flinch from the rattle in his chest-- and the spooling red timer winding its way down in the center of his vision, guiding his pistol to the round red targets before him.

Soares sprayed automatic fire at any gun that pointed in their direction, driving people to scrabble back behind cover, now suffering an assault on two sides. Anyone still dumb enough to try shooting was struck down just as fast by Jesse’s pistol, hot shells ejecting from his gun to clatter on the cement floors. 

Twelve rounds. Inhale, aim-- high and to the left, to account for the hitch in his hand-- exhale, fire. The targets flickered on and off as heads disappeared back behind crates or walls, constantly shifting the number of marks he had to work with. Fourteen targets, eleven rounds. Six targets, ten rounds. Fifteen targets, nine rounds. 

There were only three bullets left in his gun by the time Soares got them behind cover, slinging Jesse off her shoulder and throwing him across the floor, sliding on smooth floors to stop on his uninjured side, curled up and cursing, behind Maksimovich’s drop shield and hidden by the overturned metal container they were using as a makeshift barricade.

Alvarado cast him a cursory glance, tucked up against the wall and using a pair of tweezers to dig around Reyes’ side, who looked entirely unphased by the bullet(?) in his gut. His face was filthy, dark skin turned shiny by the blood coagulating on it, haphazardly wiped away from his eyes and mouth. He was more than a little nightmarish, really. 

“How you doing, kid?” he asked, the concern on his face contrasting horribly with Alvarado’s digging around his innards.

“Dunno,” Jesse wheezed. “I’m not the one Alvarado’s pullin’ bullets out of.”

At that moment, the medic in question made a small, triumphant noise, dropping the newly-freed metal round on the floor. Immediately, he shuffled forward, heaving Jesse to sit upright against the wall, Reyes forcing himself to his feet and taking his position on the very edges of the barricade, opposite the side Soares was stood on. 

“What did I tell you about doing stupid shit, Mccree?”

“Follow my dreams?”

“Kid, I swear to God, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Jesse let out a wheezy chuckle, knocking his head against the wall and letting Alvarado poke and prod at him as he pleased.

“Someone else already beat you to it, pops.” 

“Get up here, then, smartass. You feel good enough to get snappy with me, you’re plenty good to keep shooting.”

Yeah. This was much better than paperwork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your nice comments rly make my day !!!! i rly appreciate yr kind words <3


	25. 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I L I V E   
> but 4 reals heres a long chap for the long wait!! thanks for your patience once again lmao   
> this chapter gave me one heck of a time but i hope yall enjoy it!! hope yall enjoy strike team shenanigans and some soft damaged r76 
> 
> **CONTENT WARNING:**  
>  THIS CHAPTER HAS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF GORE, DESCRIPTIONS OF BODIES/DEATH, AND DESCRIPTIONS OF (SUPER ILLEGAL AND FAKE) MEDICAL/LABORATORY SETTINGS; PLEASE READ WITH DISCRETION!!
> 
> if you want the strike team bits without the darker themes, stop reading this chapter once they get to the warehouse!! ill put a summary in the end notes to read if this is a little much!!! please take care of yourselves and dont push yourself to read something that makes you uncomfortable!!

Gabriel dreamt of the Crisis. It was funny like that; when he was in the army, he dreamt of home, in the SEP, he dreamt of the army, the Crisis, he dreamt of the SEP. Now that it was over, the Crisis was a near constant in his subconscious, returning to him almost nightly in some form or another.

This time wasn’t so much a dream as it was a memory, odd things here or there that were just barely out of place in an otherwise familiar setting-- his childhood kitchen attached to a shelled-out building’s empty floor, sharks swimming in the streets below rather than the slicers that had paced the cobblestones. It was raining, when it happened, but here it snowed. In his dream, no one was on watch, instead the five of them were packed together in the corner of the room on their zipped together sleeping pads, all hidden away from the hungry world in the curve of Reinhardt’s broad, bruised body. Ana snored against Gabriel’s back, her arm lazily thrown over his middle as she mashed herself into the wall, her hand blanketed by Reinhardt’s covering it with his own. Torbjorn was curled facing the warm expanse of Reinhardt’s chest, his back pressed to Jack’s, snoring significantly quieter than Ana. Jack faced Gabriel, blue eyes open and staring at him in the silence as Gabriel stared back, their faces so close together that the breath off Jack’s lips was enough to make vapor gather on Gabriel’s unshaven beard. This was the memory, clear as glass and cradled close to Gabriel’s heart like the memories of his mother’s voice, his agents’ laughs, Fareeha’s smile.

This kind of closeness between the five of them had become commonplace since the SEP, growing even more so the longer they were out in the thick of the Crisis, using the warmth of another human person to stay sane. What would otherwise be unpleasant became something treasured; bloody noses and swollen knuckles were reminders that they still had a heart that beat, the reek of unbrushed teeth and unwashed bodies was the badge of a living thing, organic enough to have disgusting, greasy skin and sweat stained clothes. Ana did her best to keep their hair short enough not to mat, making uneven, choppy clumps with a dull survival knife and determination, though it only did so much. 

She shifted in her sleep, one of her legs tangling up with Jack’s, which were threaded between Gabriel’s own. 

This _thing_ was unspoken and unaddressed between them, left as a simple ‘it is’ rather than asking after it. Gabriel didn’t think there was a name for what they formed all huddled together and scraping to survive the nightmare of the Crisis, something they didn’t care to put a label on but was far more intimate than ‘war buddies.’ Torbjorn and Reinhardt had a name for the relationship between them, discussed with Astrid Lindholm on one of their short allotments of leave. The Amaris had a similar understanding, but Ana never addressed where she stood in the group. Jack and Gabriel were _something,_ but had yet to work up the courage to admit it, preferring instead to pretend as if the nights they spent in single beds, or the lunches with clasped hands shared beneath the table, or the private kisses stolen out of sight had never happened. When the morning came again and they untangled themselves from one another, Jack and Gabriel would act as if their faces had never been so close that their lashes could have touched, Jack’s hand had never been folded over Gabriel’s heart, Gabriel’s fingers had never traced the shape of his not-lover’s face. 

Or at least, they would have pretended, if this night had never happened. 

Jack was as nervous in the dream as he had been in life, worrying the fabric of Gabriel’s dirty shirt between his fingers and breathing heavier than usual, mouth working to say words that wouldn’t come. Gabriel didn’t try to push him, instead letting Jack take his time, the night feeling endless and safe in the broken building where they hid. Part of the roof was collapsed, a shell having bitten out a chunk of the structure’s face and leaving gaping wound in the cement through which Gabriel could see the stars, clear without the lights of civilization to blot them out. They brought out the gunmetal-grey in Jack’s eyes.

“...,” Jack said, mouth shaping words, but without any sound to accompany it.

“What?” Gabriel whispered.

Jack leaned forward and ever so softly knocked his chapped lips into Gabriel’s bitten and bleeding ones, not quite a kiss, but certainly not anything else. 

“I love you,” he murmured into the dark, voice shaking as the words fell from his lips, more a breath than a phrase, said so softly Gabriel would have missed it had he not felt the shape of them on his mouth.

Jack had never said it before that moment, and Gabriel had been alright with that. He understood. The first time Gabriel had told Jack he loved him, he hadn’t expected a response, and he hadn’t gotten one aside from an open mouth and a guilty look. He never pressed-- knew Jack felt the same, and he was just fine waiting until he was ready to say so-- and he was glad for it, glad to know the phrase came because Jack wanted to say it, not because anyone else did.

In the dream and the memory alike, Gabriel smiled, wide and genuine despite the sting of his split lips. He brought the hand resting on Jack’s jaw to slide behind his ear, pulling him close and smushing their noses together, gently carding through the short blonde hair beneath his fingers.

“I love you, too,” he replied, and felt a shy, dopey grin move against his skin to match his own. It was all Jack and no Morrison, no John, or Cadet, or Soldier, or anything else. For a second, they were just Jack, and just Gabriel. In that moment, hidden away from the world and wrapped in the safety of familiar bodies, Gabriel truly believed the Crisis could be won. More than that, he believed, for a second, that he could survive it. That one day, he could go home, find out what happened to his family, use his military compensation to buy some empty plot of land on the edge of town, and he could live some kind of normal life. 

One out of three wasn’t so bad. 

He woke up for real not long after, finding Torbjorn’s face stuck in his cleavage and Jack drooling on his shoulder. Dreams, unfortunately, tended to be a whole lot more romantic than the real thing. Dream-Jack didn’t drool so much. 

He could hear Ana snoring from somewhere behind him and, judging from the wall of warmth radiating from the same direction, Reinhardt was somewhere close by, all four of them sleeping peacefully on the spongy pull out mattress set up in the middle of the safehouse living room. They were just at the edge of New Amsterdam, straddling the line between the new buildings and the old abandoned ones that had been left unoccupied since the Crisis was in full swing. 

They landed at the airport two days ago and spent yesterday revising and rewriting their plan, quadruple checking weapon integrities, running back and forth between the store to stock up the cabinets with more food (Gabriel’s insistence) and to resupply the medicine cabinet (Ana’s).

Cleanup had done a thorough pickapart of the Czech bunker cleared last month, and managed to trace back the supply shipments-- most notably, the scientific materials-- to another nonexistent hidey-hole in the abandoned sector of the city among the old, broken buildings, left untouched and forgotten like Eichenwald and urban Gibraltar. Gabriel suggested that the five of them investigate, wanting to get all of Overwatch’s divisions involved if his hunch was right and there was a bigger picture, here. Like the one before, this warehouse didn’t technically exist, and a quick ask around informed them that the people who frequented the area were dubbed ‘up to something,’ which was more than enough reason for Gabriel. He knew the others disagreed, but they hadn’t all been on a mission together for more than a year, so they didn’t stop him. 

Gabriel carefully extracted himself from between Jack and Torbjorn, managing to do so without waking Jack, at least, Torbjorn throwing him a brief, dirty look before scooting over to the spot Gabriel had just been. He peeled off his drool-soaked shirt and tossed it over the back of a chair, making his way over to the little bathroom and brushing his teeth, sticking his head in the sink to try and get his sleep-mussed, newly trimmed hair to lay flat, to no avail. A brief peek through the curtains let him see the barest hints of morning sunlight, beginning to turn the sky pink and casting colorful beams on the walls.

Reinhardt was second to get up, roused by the sounds of Gabriel going about the kitchen, taking up residence at his side and mixing the boxed pancake batter on the countertop without being asked, lasting about three minutes before he started humming. Reinhardt always hummed when he cooked.

The humming woke Torbjorn, who woke Jack, and they briefly bickered over who got the bathroom first before Jack conceded and sulked on the couch while he waited his turn. Reinhardt set out two mugs of coffee for them as they settled at the kitchen’s island, an affectionate peck on the cheek accompanying Torbjorn’s mug, and one on the forehead for Jack, who turned an amusing shade of pink. The smell of cooking food was what finally roused Ana, previously dead to the world and comfortably sprawled across the vacated pullout, her hair stuck up and wild where it fell out of her bun and stubble collecting on her chin. She shambled about the little safehouse making a general menace of herself, stealing sips of other people’s coffee, dipping her fingers into the pancake batter, attempting to burrow her way under Reinhardt’s shirt while he tried to cook, and customarily harassing Jack as she woke up, responding to people only with guttural grunts or self-satisfied snickering when she got a particularly flustered response, usually on Jack’s end.

“Alright,” Gabriel said around a mouthful of bacon, standing at the kitchen’s island and shoveling down breakfast with the rest of his team. “Over the plan one more time?”

“We’ve done this more than a dozen times, Gabi.” Ana carelessly dripped syrup on the counter as she gestured widely with her fork, and Torbjorn proceeded to lick his thumb and wipe it off the counter before it could dry too sticky. 

“And we can do it a dozen more, if you want.”

All four of them groaned.

“As much as we love your voice,” Reinhardt was polite enough to finish his mouthful before he continued. “We all have the greatest trust in your ability to lead us to victory, Gabriel. Simply point us in the right direction, and we will see tomorrow without a doubt.”

“He means ‘shut your god forsaken trap.’ We know the plan,” Torbjorn growled, hunching protectively over his pancakes as Ana eyed them across the table, fork held like a javelin in her hand. 

Jack drained his third glass of orange juice, casting Gabriel a sympathetic look. The two of them still had a metric fuckall lot to talk through, but now wasn’t the time. Seemed like it was never the time. Being all together eased the tension, though.

“Ana’s got a point, Gabriel. We’ve done crazier than this, and come out fine. Er, mostly fine. Usually.”

“Great vote of confidence,” Torbjorn put in, and Jack elbowed him in the side, receiving a harder, metal elbow in return. 

“What I’m saying is: we’ll do just fine. We have the plan down, okay? We know what we’re doing.”

Gabriel blew a long breath out his lips, slow and controlled like a smoker’s exhale. Of course he knew they could handle it. He knew the strike would, by all likelihoods, end up just fine. Reinhardt didn’t have his full crusader gear, but he had a more portable substitute that was guaranteed to be safe as life, having been built by Torbjorn, himself; Ana was doing well, emotionally--Gabriel knew every one of her tells that said she was stressed or apprehensive, feeling the weight of killing on her shoulders, and he saw none of them now-- Jack was relaxed and ready to listen to what Gabriel had to say, less combative than he’d been the last few weeks, seemingly comforted by being back in the swing of things as they’d been in the past. Torbjorn was… Torbjorn. 

Everything was going to be just fine. 

10:47 PM, standing outside the warehouse and hidden in the dark, Gabriel was beginning to have second thoughts. 

Not because anything had gone wrong, or anything like that, but just because he was feeling apprehensive. He disliked the idea of sending some of the most important people in his world into a live-fire zone, despite how familiar with it they may have been. It was the nature of his work, and he felt the same every time he sent his agents out on missions. Usually, he could clamp down on the pre-mission anxieties before they really started to get to him, but here, crouched in the dark, he couldn’t shake the feeling of _wrongness_ sitting heavy in the pit of his stomach, making his hair stand on end and rolling cold sweat down his neck. 

He didn’t need to speak, here. Simply lifted a hand in the air, breathed out low and slow, and ticked down a finger. To his right, Jack’s rifle came to life, emitting a high, electronic buzz only audible to their enhanced ears, harmonizing with the quiet singsong hum produced by his visor. Torbjorn released Reinhardt’s hand, stepping to the back of the group with his gun in hand, the hot metal rolling about the barrel casting a soft orange glow against his face. When Gabriel folded down another digit, Reinhardt squared himself, feet braced apart as he adjusted his hold on his hammer, the rocket fire engines on the head warming up while Ana carefully loaded a round into her rifle, clicking the multi-chamber magazine left, the sound of darts being prepared for firing clicking oh so softly as she pulled a grenade from her belt, rolling it between her fingertips. Gabriel clenched his fist and slid the access card-- gained from the Czech sting-- over the door sensor, metal panels tearing apart like the wide, violent maw of a living beast, howling and toothed to devour them whole.

There were no bullets.

Instead, Gabriel was hit by a wall of stench, overwhelming and putrid, left to ferment in its sealed cage and so strong it nearly toppled him over. Ana got it a moment later, doubling over and retching as Torbjorn gently rubbed circles over her back. Reinhardt took a step back, weakly covering his face with the forearm of his hammer’s arm. 

“Oh, fuck,” Jack groaned, and Gabriel had to agree. Littered across the stone floors were corpses, too many to count, reeking and rotting like something out of a horror film. 

“Jack?”

“No. I’m not getting anything. I don’t-- there’s nothing alive in here, Gabriel. It’s all just…,” Jack trailed off, slowly sweeping his eyes over the scene, the bright screen of his visor lighting his cheek blue. 

Reinhardt slowly lowered his shield, letting it dissolve when Gabriel didn’t say anything to stop him. They hadn’t seen this kind of carnage since the heat of the Crisis; or at least, none of them but Gabriel. Blackwatch stumbled on these every once in awhile, but usually, it was Blackwatch that caused it. The thought of someone else being able to wreak this kind of havoc rubbed Gabriel the wrong way, to say the least. 

He hooked two fingers into the collar of his shirt and drew it over his nose, though it did little to help. About his feet, little bugs scuttled across the floors, flies bumbling about the air and over the unfortunate fallen like a second skin. The closest figure to the door was one lying face-down, arm outstretched and hand reaching toward the exit, seized by rigor mortis and frozen in their mad scramble for a way out. They didn’t hold a weapon. Gabriel crouched to his knees and looked over the body, easily determining the cause of death to be the extra few pounds of bullets shot into their back, as well as a second, more deliberate shot delivered to the back of their head with a different gun, execution style.  
“You with me, Jackie?”

Jack usually had a stomach like Gabriel’s, able to follow him into just about any hellhole and keep his lunch down. Ana was easily rocked by nightmares like this one, and Reinhardt’s warm cheer tended to go cold, instead replaced by an empty grief no matter the character of the victim. Torbjorn could handle it, but he disliked leaving Ana and Reinhardt in such a pained state, frequently opting instead to stay and provide comfort, the paternal instinct in him rearing its head something fierce and forcing him to stay put.

Gabriel knew what Jack’s answer would be, because wherever he went, Jack would follow, but he still asked out of courtesy.

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

Gabriel pressed deeper into the building, Jack trailing along at his side, a silent reassurance keeping both of their nerves in check. Like the first body, those that followed had clearly been gunned down, most unarmed and all with the same, separate hole through their heads. Gabriel would blame it on gang violence, but he knew gangs well enough to know they weren’t this organized, this precise, this thorough. Not only that, but a brief look over a few of the corpses revealed a menagerie of gangs’ markings, despite every person being dressed in the same uniform. They found no weapons other than pistols or old assault rifles, but the bullets embedded in the dead weren’t from either kind of gun.

Some bodies were slumped over behind boxes and crates, as if they’d hidden for cover there. Gabriel pointed from the makeshift barricade to the stone wall, and Jack followed it, digging his fingers into the holes in the cement and jimmying out bullets with the blade of his knife while Gabriel tried to do the same with those that had flown the opposite way and embedded themselves in the metal support beams that held the high roof. Another oddity. No rust was to be found on any of the pillars, the walls had no cracks or stains, the ceiling didn’t bow. The building, for all intents and purposes, looked as well kept as if it had never been abandoned at all. 

Jack returned to him, holding his cupped hand alongside Gabriel’s.

“Last I checked, these aren’t ten millimeter,” he said drily. “And I don’t know many pre-war automatics that use hard-light combustion rounds.”

Gabriel grunted an agreement. “I haven’t even seen these before.” He picked up one of the bullets he’d dug from the beam. It was small, almost pellet like, spiked and shaped like the goatheads that got stuck in Gabriel’s socks back in basic. He poured his handful into Jack’s and crouched down beside one of the corpses, biting down on his lips to keep from gagging as he cut away their uniform to try and retrieve one of the bullets embedded in their skin. Like those stuck in the metal, these were spiked and mean, though Gabriel took careful notice of the fact that no insects or living things dared come near it. 

“Really not looking forward to fishing out the other ones,” Jack groaned, casting a queasy glance at the body’s sunken face and the hole between their eyes. 

“You and me both.”

Gabriel enlisted Jack’s help in rolling the figure over though he didn’t really need it, taking some small comfort in the warmth of having their arms pressed together. 

As expected, an ugly hole was burrowed into the concrete, the result of a gun being fired too close to its target and barreling straight through. However, as Gabriel leaned closer, he saw no bullet lodged in the floor, only an empty socket since clogged with blood and unpleasantries. 

“...You think they took the evidence?” Jack ventured, though didn’t sound like he believed it, himself.

“Bodies haven’t been moved.”

“Was afraid you were gonna say that. So, what are the chances this was just a turf war?”

Gabriel chewed absently on his cheek, thinking. There was no way this was something as simple as a turf war, was there? Maybe, if he was worse at his job, he might have thought it was a civil kind of conflict; the multitude of gangs packed into one space letting tensions get too high and lashing out at one another. But the bodies ducked behind cover altogether were from different factions, and had clearly been fighting against someone or something as a team. Besides, there were no survivors, or at least, none that Jack and Gabriel had been able to find. This wasn’t another gang. Or if it was, it was one Gabriel wasn’t familiar with, which was a bad sign. Sure, every now and again, a new player would pop into the game after hiding their tracks well enough to stay off Blackwatch radar, but they didn’t stay hidden for long, and definitely not long enough to have done something of this caliber without getting caught. It looked a whole lot like they were dealing with ghosts, and those were Gabriel’s least favorite kinds of enemies. 

“Not likely.”

“Well, shit. Looks like you were right.”

“Never thought I’d hate hearing that, but here we are.”

Jack might have laughed, were they in different circumstances. As it was, his hand found the small of Gabriel’s back as he folded into Jack’s chest to try and escape the overwhelming stench of the coffin in which they stood, two living bodies in a place where the living had no place to tread, anymore. 

“Do we keep looking? Or just… send in cleanup? Whose team are we gonna have investigating this?”

Gabriel shrugged. “There’s got to be _something_ here, Jackie. You can wait out with the others, if you want--” He wouldn’t.

“I’m fine.”

“--but I’m gonna keep digging. Think both of us should be on this one. Blackwatch intelligence is good, but I’ve got a hunch that whoever did this is gonna need more firepower to take down than we can offer.”

Jack gave him a wide-eyed look. It wasn’t often that Gabriel found a case his agents couldn’t handle, and usually, he hated admitting it.

“You think it’s something that bad?”

“Might be. Not willing to take chances.”

“Good point.”

Gabriel reluctantly stepped away from the shield of Jack’s chest, his footsteps echoing through the space even as he tried to make them silent. He and Jack went about the warehouse, forcing open doors and rooting through crates, checking the markings on bodies and occasionally double checking the bullets they managed to dig out of flesh or stone. Nothing new revealed itself. 

“Gabriel,” Jack called from across the room, and Gabriel followed the odd echoes until he found Jack trying to force his hands between another sliding door, more stubborn than the others.

Gabriel tried the access card, but when nothing happened, he took up a spot opposite from Jack, trying to hook his fingers between the sliding doors and pull. Slowly but steadily, they managed to tear the panels apart, Gabriel nearly dropping his side when he was hit with the stench of the room before them. It was worse than the kitchen, cold sweat collecting on his upper lip with the instinctual knowledge that this smell came from something far different than rotting food.

Inside, the lights were on, but Gabriel wished they weren’t. 

About the room, there were long exam tables and scientific equipment, broken test tubes and shattered beakers, huge tanks that looked like they’d been smashed completely with-- most horrifying-- things that might have been bodies piled in and around their sturdy, metal bases. Jack actually recoiled completely, stumbling backwards and narrowly avoiding falling on his ass as he scrambled out of the room with his back pressed to the crates that had hidden the door. 

“Fuck. Jack, is anything…?”

Gabriel got no response other than a strangled choking noise as Jack tried not to be sick, and he moved onward into the space, peeling ruined papers off the floor where they’d been drenched with blood and whatever fluid were in the tubes, making Gabriel infinitely grateful for the thick gloves protecting his hands. Below his feet, glass crunched and squeaked, making him jump every time he shifted his weight from foot to foot. 

He came to the huge chambers last, hesitant to get within a few feet for the animal terror that writhed about his chest from being near them. The glass looked like it had been bashed in by something heavy, crumpling in on itself and gory on the corners of the jagged material, like something had been pulled out of it. Stagnant fluid sat in the barely-intact bowl of glass that remained, similarly void of insects and mixed with a little blood that sat atop the surface like oil on water. Gabriel didn’t touch it. He wasn’t feeling brave enough to inspect any of the things piled in or about the shattered tanks, yet, instead opting to look over the slumped, white-coated bodies strewn about the room, some thrown over their own desks or still half sitting in their chairs. Wherever their skin touched the wet floor, no bugs dared to go near. One scientist was collapsed against a tank, drenched in the same odd solution that filled it, and Gabriel didn’t see a single insect so much as consider them, flitting about safer targets, instead. 

He couldn’t find the courage to do much more than glance at the ugly heaps of flesh in their glass hearses, using his shotgun to flop one over on its back(?), breath coming frantic and strained in his throat as he took in the sight before him. It might have been a person, in the most generous sense of the word; its face featureless with what could have counted as skin stretched over its skull. There was a similar hole in its head, and for the first time, Gabriel found himself grateful someone had gotten here first. It was purple, almost, reminiscent of the gone-wrong experiments Moira and Mercy conducted when they tried to hone in on biotic healing. The sickly pallor of its skin wasn’t unlike the points of contact from Ana’s darts, implying some kind of deep-set poisoning, or something similar. Overwatch and Blackwatch both had been using biotic tech in and outside of combat for a few years, but had been very careful in keeping it impossible to recreate outside their science department as well as refraining to share it with the public, much to the UN’s displeasure. Gabriel had been one of the strongest opposers to sharing it with the world, for the specific reason that it could be reverse-engineered and used to make bioweapons worse than the future would be able to deal with. Weapons like whatever was used on the body at his feet. 

Someone else had their tech, or was way too close to it for comfort. 

“Fuck. _Fuck,_ ” he turned to Jack, who was still lingering in the doorway, toeing the line between the concrete and once-sterile synthetic floors. “I’m calling in cleanup. Get us extraction.” Softer, almost shaking. “Please.”

Jack nodded jerkily, stumbling away from the room as Gabriel followed, looping their way back through the building to the exit, both hoarsely barking commands into their earpieces.

Jack sounded pristine and professional as always, his voice and his face forever stoic despite the way his fingertips picked at his scalp and his chest heaved with barely-kept panic.   
Why they made him Strike Commander, he supposed. Looked great on camera, no matter what went on in that head of his.

“Ezra?”

“Yes, Commander?” Ezra sighed into Gabriel’s ear, all soft music and silk, warm like the sun with the kind of cadence that could convince the dead to dance. 

“We need cleanup,” he grunted back, trying to keep the tremor from his voice. Of course, Ezra would hear it, because Ezra was Blackwatch, and Gabriel didn’t train amateurs. 

“Mm. Should I send a medic?”

“No. No, we’re fine. Or, fuck. Yeah, send a medic. Got a lot of bodies, in here.”

“How fun.”

“Not really. We didn’t do it.”

A short pause. “Unfortunate. Do we need detainment?”

“No. I need evidence. Forensics. Get me ballistics, too. Send in the fucking calvary, Ezra. It’s ugly.”

“Understood.”

“Make a new file, too. ‘Amsterdam;’ and I want it to be an open file for Overwatch’s stationary teams. Put me, Soares, Robin, and Montreal on it, for now. And Kipps.”

“Should I add Alvarado? And do you want evidence going to our division?”

Alvarado was an excellent field medic, sure, but he had more empathy than was going to be good for him, if more situations turned up like this one. 

“No on both. I want everything sent to genetics, out in Switzerland. Get me O’Dorain on it. I’ll kiss asses if I have to.”

“Anything else?”

“Send a gen message out to all agent communications that we got a ghost floating around, and to stay safe. Eyes peeled for anything fishy, report back to me ASAP.”

“I’ll have it global within the hour. Cleanup is mobilizing now, should be on location by 01:00 by the latest.”

“Thanks, Ezra.”

“Always, Gabriel. That’s why you hired me.”

He hung up on Ezra, peeling off his gloves and shoving them into his pockets, instead, reaching up and pulling Jack’s similarly-freed hand from his neck where it’d been tearing into his skin. He threaded their fingers together and let them hang in the space between them, using the contact to try and bring himself back down to earth.

“Extraction is on their way. The Amsterdam airbase is sending a jet now-- it’ll only be a few minutes. Then we get out of here. We’re out. We don’t… we don’t have to be here, anymore.” Jack’s voice remained steady as his free hand fell from his comm, but his chest heaved like he’d been running a marathon, his eyes staring at something distant and pulse hammering where his wrist pressed against Gabriel’s.

Ana, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn were where they’d left them, standing in a huddle, Ana hidden away in Reinhardt’s embrace while Torbjorn gently stroked hands over his face, murmuring something soft in Swedish that Gabriel couldn’t understand. He’d picked up bits and pieces, but not enough to know the quiet words that Torbjorn said into the cool night air, too fast and not vulgar enough for Gabriel to identify anything substantial. It was better that way, he figured, that the intimate conversation between the two remained private. As Jack and Gabriel approached, he looked up.

“So?”

“Bad,” Gabriel rasped, shaking his head and joining the other strike members, feeling Jack tuck up against his side a moment later, all five of them standing close and sharing in the comfort found together.

“Extraction’s gonna be here soon,” Jack whispered. “We can leave.”

Their pilot said nothing when she arrived, opening the bay doors and inviting them into the carrier with a wink and a smile that fell away when she took in their faces and caught a whiff of the stench that was beginning to permeate the air. A few Overwatch agents spilled out as they got in, taking up stances outside the door and securing perimeters before cleanup got there. 

Gabriel started tearing off armor before the ship even left the ground, popping a few stitches on his gear as he worked to get it away from him. It stunk like death and rot, like the shiny liquid in the lab and the rotting food in the kitchen, the stale gunpowder and the nesting insects that made themselves homes from spoiled flesh. It was the weight of all those bodies pressing down on his skin, the slide of innards against his fingertips, the bite of those fucking bullets digging into his gloves and catching on the fabric; those bullets that he’d never seen before and the bullets that disappeared into thin air. He hated ghosts. Hated them because they did things like this and got away with it, because they struck at other ghosts. Ghosts like Gabriel, himself. He saw the bodies in the warehouse and saw his own agents piled about, heaped and forgotten in a wretched tomb they didn’t deserve. It was Robin who reached for the door with his desperate hands outstretched, it was Nakano who was draped over a fallen Defranco in efforts of protecting his broken body with her own, it was Soares who was lying torn to pieces across from the nearly-broken and bloody wall full of minigun rounds, but who had no gun in her hand, her blaze of glory erased by wretched hands. It was Mccree who was slumped against a metal beam with a shot in his spine and an empty gun in his hand, probably still living when the ghosts put their vanishing bullets in his head and left him to decay, alone and forgotten in that godforsaken place, eaten through by maggots and never given a chance to live before it was torn so violently from his hands. 

Gabriel didn’t realize he was crying until Reinhardt wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and used the corners to dab at his face. 

“We will find who did this,” Reinhardt promised, steering Gabriel to sit down on the carrier’s uncomfortable, military-style bench and gently pushing a set of clean clothes into his hands. “And they will suffer our consequences.”

Gabriel let himself be fragile, for a moment, hiding swept up in Reinhardt’s arms as they switched carriers to be taken back to Gibraltar. They would regroup there, and likely part ways again; Reinhardt, Torbjorn, and Jack would probably head back to Sweden or Switzerland, where Torbjorn’s greater engineering projects were stashed away and Jack’s command would be strongest. Ana might take a brief leave with Fareeha, and Gabriel wouldn’t be able to blame her. He could handle a lot, but that warehouse was… ugly, to say the least. It wasn’t the bodies that disturbed him so, though they definitely played a part. It wasn’t even the laboratory, despite the fact it would likely haunt his dreams for however long to come. No, what really got Gabriel was the fact that nobody _found_ it. Not a single soul had breached the warehouse since whatever tragedy befell the people in it. No one had even thought to look. No one filed missing persons reports-- Blackwatch kept tabs on them, in case of serial abductions or other correlated cases-- no one asked the police, no one even cared to investigate. The corpses left to decay in that building belonged to ‘shady characters’, and thus, were left alone. Like no one had ever even considered they were still people. 

Gabriel curled up with Ana on the carrier after he’d showered in the tiny bathroom, scrubbing his skin raw until Torbjorn chased him out. It was there he lay, wrapped in blankets and pillowing his head on Ana’s chest, letting the steady sound of her heartbeat soothe him as she absently carded through his hair, both of them bracketed in by Torbjorn’s knees where he sat pressed against Reinhardt’s side, Jack tucked into his shoulder and hiding from the world.

Killing was easier than dealing with the already-dead, in Gabriel’s opinion. It was easier to take a life than it was to stumble upon a building full of victims; easier to take someone’s head off with his shotguns when he didn’t have to see their form weeks after the fact. It wasn’t even the falling apart that was so horrible to look at. Decay was natural, and, in some cases, even beautiful, a return to the earth in which the roots and plants made themselves at peace in the ribcage of a skeleton bleached by the sun, like those of deer or other animals found wandering the woods. A sequence of life, a peace, a burial without false preservation. Gabriel hoped that whenever he went, he could be left to break down as nature intended. The bodies in the warehouse didn’t get the option. They were a bastardization and a tragedy, stripped of their right to rot in peace and left festering on cold stone floors that couldn’t welcome them the way soil could. They were treated as if their deaths were meaningless. As if death was ever meaningless.

He fell asleep sometime in between his thoughts, roused by Ana’s chest rumbling as she chuckled at something Torbjorn said. She’d come back to herself a little during the flight, losing the glazed look in her eyes and finding the barest hint of a smile to place on her lips before they landed. Fareeha was usually waiting outside, after all, and she didn’t need to be worried. Reinhardt’s mood was similarly brightened by the improvement in Ana’s attitude, and Torbjorn followed suit. Jack was still shaken, Gabriel could tell, but he was far better having gotten away from New Amsterdam. Gabriel’d been worse. He’d been a whole lot better, but he’d been worse, too. He could force some cheer when Fareeha came to welcome them back.

The flight bay was empty, cleared out when the carrier arrived as per Gabriel’s request. When he came back from missions, more often than not he wanted a bit of time to himself to recenter his thoughts before he went out to interact with his agents. Much as he loved them, they could be a royal pain in the ass. The rule held fast, and the bay was empty until the elevator opened, and out sprinted Fareeha, stumbling and grinning. As soon as she appeared, Gabriel felt a weight remove itself from his chest, dissolving along with the tenseness in his shoulders.

“Mom, look what I can do!” she shouted, her voice echoing off the walls and hitting Gabriel’s ears in a symphony of noise, though he didn’t mind.

“Put that down,” Torbjorn barked back. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Ana took one look at her daughter and promptly doubled over, hands on her knees and cackling, almost tipping over from how hard the laughter wracked her form. Gabriel blinked.

“Mccree?”

“Hey, pops.”

Fareeha hefted Mccree in her arms, held in a bridal carry with his hands loosely wrapped around her neck and his hat sitting lopsided on her head. He winked, shooting a finger gun at Jack, who openly stared back.

“Morrison.” A moment’s pause. “Morrison’s arms.”

And Gabriel fell forward, knocking into Ana’s shoulder in a similar bout of laughter, the cold stress at the back of his neck receding into something warm and soothed in his chest. Gibraltar was safe. The world spun on. _The Crisis could be won._ The ghosts could be caught. And when they were, they were gonna have hell to pay-- but for now, Gabriel was content to shirk his heroic duties in favor of watching the angry, embarrassed pink spread over Jack’s face and feeling Ana’s sharp laughter rumble against his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a summary of the warehouse section: the team finds the warehouse full of dead people from a multitude of gangs, but there is no evidence as to who did it. gabe and jack investigate farther, and find some weird spiky bullets and bullets that   
> 'disappear', as well as a nasty lab that makes gabe think that someone else has figured out biotic sciences. he tells ezra to send any evidence the cleanup crew comes up with to switzerland, and wants moira to look over it. he makes a new case file called 'amsterdam' that both overwatch and blackwatch can collaborate on for the investigation.
> 
>  
> 
> thanks again for reading all!!! this ones a lil dark, i kno, but i appreciate all yalls support as i update !! it means the dang world to me   
> the chap after this i think is gonna be the mccree family chapter!!!! after that theres another mission shenanigans chapter w jess nakano and defranco as well as some chatter between jess n angie, and then i think its finally GENJI TIME
> 
> HOWEVER those predictions mean approx nothin cause im ass bad at pacin my chapters lmao
> 
> again tho thank you so much and sorry for the wait!! ill try to be a lil more punctual w my next update lmao,, but the next update i do might be on the hana fic, not this one!! if yr into darker themes that one i think would b,,, a neat read,,,,,,,,,, winksd...,


	26. 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HHHHHHHHHHHHERES AN UPDATE, FINALLY
> 
> HOT DAMN WAS THAT A LONG HIATUS, MY BAD  
> THIS CHAPTER WAS GIVIN ME ONE HELL OF A TIME
> 
> as always if i can improve on anything i love to hear it !!! im doin my best but my writing can be a lil Rough sometimes but i think im gettin better!!

“Jesse! Déjame!”

“ _Qué,_ hermanita? No puedo oirte.”

“Jesse!”

McCree cackled not unlike Soares, then, swinging Soledad over his shoulder and barreling across the backyard with the twins at his heels, slipping along on mud-slick feet. Cora refrained from joining them, far more content to hang on Duke’s shirt and pet the loose strands of hair that fell from the bun on his head and spilled over his shoulders, going grey at the temples and identically ink black to his daughter’s. Maria sat beside him, working down a chunk of wood with a weathered old pocket knife, mirrored by the nigh-identical shape of Raúl with his head resting on her knee, idly painting his way through another watercolor of the sunset, the fifth Gabriel had seen him make in as many days. 

Every McCree seemed to wear some variation of the same face, a half-dozen nesting dolls distinct only in their details. Each-- aside from Duke, that is-- donned the same thick curls and damp, drooping eyes, identically sharp witted and soft hearted. Maria was unlike Raúl only in the network of scar tissue over her skin and the way she held herself, stocky and powerful with all the graceful, predatory swagger of a woman well-versed in warfare. She’d nearly took Gabriel’s head off, when she first met him; took one look at McCree and Duke collapsed and weeping on the front stoop and was moving before even McCree could get a word in edgewise, gun up and pointed at the space right between Gabriel’s eyes with all the neck-snap accuracy of her son at her feet. She nearly repainted the house with the contents of Gabriel’s skull before McCree managed to convince her otherwise. He didn’t harbor any hard feelings. He’d have done the same if Fareeha showed up on his doorstep, five years older and a gang’s brand in her skin. 

“Mamá! Papá!” Soledad shouted, muffled by her thrashing in McCree’s grip as he threatened to throw her into the chicken pen. “Raúl! Gabriel! _Anybody_?” 

“You’re a big girl,” Maria said, not looking up from her carving as she set a hand on Duke’s chest, keeping him from standing. 

Duke looked a little like he might explode, caught between keeping Cora, now peacefully dozing, at rest on his shoulder and rushing to the aid of his daughter. He reminded Gabriel a lot of Reinhardt, with the same deep-set smile lines and massive stature, if only built to accommodate the overwhelming size of his heart. McCree, Soledad, and Cora were all his and Maria’s, and while they might have shared Maria’s face, Duke shone through in the royal jut of their noses, proud and convex-- not so much as Ana’s-- and the hopelessly crooked line of their smiles, endlessly charming and just as charismatic. Where Maria had been cautiously suspicious of him, Duke was more than friendly toward Gabriel, though that seemed more to be a general facet of his personality than any great partiality to him. Maria warmed up over the last few months, but she was nothing compared to the affectionate assault of her husband. Gabriel couldn’t count the number of times he’d found himself wrapped in an embrace, kissed on the cheek, the forehead, the temple, or had his face cradled in Duke’s hands, all as if it was nothing more than a passing gesture. In the McCree household, it certainly looked like it was, judging by the frequency with which he did the same to the house’s other inhabitants. 

“Relax, Duke,” Gabriel sighed, keeping his voice soft so as not to startle Raúl, sat as far from him as possible, as per usual. As per usual, Raúl jolted at the sound, despite all Gabriel tried to do to make himself nonthreatening. He’d be a little more offended if Raúl didn’t seem so nervous about everything. Gabriel had a sneaking suspicion his skittishness had at least something to do with the distinct absence of the twins’ mother, and made sure one of his stationaries had an eye on her, wherever she was, just in case Raúl ever needed the favor. 

“I know, I know. She’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself. It’s just--” Duke spoke Spanish with an accent Gabriel couldn’t place, hanging off the end of his words like raindrops off roof tiles. 

“She’s fine. If Jesse drops her, most she’ll get is a few bruises.”

Maria snorted.

“If Jesse drops her, it’s not her I’m worried about.”

“He’s gotta learn somehow.”

McCree shouldn’t have been running at all, technically, seeing as he was still on ‘medical leave’ for the graze across his leg he got on his last mission. He’d been walking on it the second Mercy had it patched up, but it was an excuse for him to fly down to Santa Fe, and, same as he had since reconnecting with his family, he was quick to take the chance to go and see them. He always opened the invitation to Gabriel, who did his best to shirk as much of his schedule as he could to indulge him. Two weeks, McCree had been out here, and Gabriel had swung by for the last five days before they both flew back out to Gibraltar again on Thursday. The break was nice. 

Still, even in the warmth of the old ranch, familiar in the same cramped, lived-in way as his mother’s house back in Los Angeles, every time he closed his eyes, all that greeted him was the image of the abandoned warehouse in Amsterdam. The warehouse, the paperwork that followed, the harrowed circles under Moira’s eyes, the frantic fury of Mercy nearly tearing her lab apart, stopped only by McCree dragging her away. It caught him when he least expected it, always when it shouldn’t have. Someone at the table laughed, and the shine of their teeth became the dead man’s grin of a body left to rot, the lips peeled away by dehydration and decomposition alike. The dish soap in the sink or cheap shampoo in his bag turned into the slime in the tanks, and it took all of the strength in him to keep from panicking, to keep Ana’s voice in his head like a tape stuck on loop to repeat over and over the pattern of his inhale and exhale until he came back to the world at large. 

Maria understood, and didn’t bother him when she ghosted downstairs in the middle of the night to join him in the silence, similarly stricken by wakefulness in the dark. McCree got it too, but more often than not, that just meant he sat out in the chicken coop or sought refuge with one of his sisters. Seemed like that, too, was common in the house; dozens of photographs dotted the walls of the children piled up under blankets and snoring altogether, mixed with ones of even more unfamiliar faces that Gabriel had since identified as Maria and Raúl, nearly identical in their childhoods, much like Deborah and Louise were now. Once or twice, Gabriel had come downstairs only to find McCree already there, idly scrolling through his datapad while Soledad slept on his lap and not finding restfulness until Gabriel dragged him into his side and hummed along to the same lullabies he’d heard as a kid. There was a photo of all three of them hung on the wall now, too. 

That was the funny thing about the McCree’s-- they didn’t hold any grudges against Gabriel despite the danger he’d put their son in, despite the fact he’d quite literally stolen the right to guardianship from them while they lived and breathed and loved just miles away from where Gabriel had plucked McCree from the desert. More than that, they thanked him for it. As if he’d done them a favor, or that he’d brought something good to their lives, when really, it was the opposite. Maria and Duke-- and even Soledad, Raúl, and the twins-- treated Gabriel as if he were just as much family to them as McCree was, and while Gabriel was no stranger to families found and built by choice, it was odd to find himself welcomed into one, rather than being the one doing the welcoming. He loved McCree like his own son, the same as he loved Fareeha as his own daughter, but he hadn’t quite realized how much McCree accepted him as a father, more than just a placeholder for the one he’d left behind. It was equally heartwarming as it was terrifying, made more so by the fact that McCree was in _Blackwatch_. His family was fully aware of it, of course, because Gabriel Reyes was, in fact, written on McCree’s legal paperwork, and they were more than smart enough to know the consequences of saying anything about it, anyway, but that meant Gabriel was throwing McCree into danger almost constantly. Weren’t parents supposed to keep their kids safe? _Away_ from bullets, and not between them? How could Maria let him set foot in her home when he was putting her son through the same hell she’d gone through, albeit in a different shape? How could any of them, when there was already one photo in the living room dressed in a pair of dogtags and pressed marigolds, clothed in Maria’s eyes and Duke’s smile, shiny black hair plaited down over her shoulders the same as Cora’s, spotted in a constellation of acne scars the same as McCree, dotted in little stripes of keloid tissue over her face from fistfights since won the same as Soledad? Now that he had the chance to be safe and happy, why did McCree still stay in a division that would kill him? Why did Gabriel _let_ him? If her death was the reason McCree ran in the first place, driven by fury and spite against a world void of justice, why did Maria and Duke give history the chance to repeat itself? What if--

“Gabe?

“Huh?”

Gabriel blinked. He was standing in the kitchen, but didn’t completely remember how he got there, bare feet cold on the old tile floors. The last of the sun had since dipped below the horizon, but he could still hear the rest of the family chattering outside, likely gathered around the firepit or watching the twins bolt around the yard with sparklers or glowsticks in hand. It might have been both, but the fire was usually left unlit if Cora was out and playing, too. It took him a few seconds to register the hand on his arm, and longer still to realize who it belonged to.

“You okay, jefe?”

McCree’s accent in English was Duke’s. So were the handful of words in a language Gabriel didn’t recognize, though Duke spoke them much more fluently than any of his children.

“I’m fine,” he lied. Unfortunately, McCree was Blackwatch, so he saw through the lie as clear as Gabriel could through the windowpane. 

“Uh, permission to speak or whatever, but. Horseshit? You’ve been outta it since dinner. I ain’t blind.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“About?”

“Nothing you gotta worry about.”

“...Amsterdam?”

“You don’t know about Amsterdam, Jesse.”

“Yeah, I d--”

“No, you don’t.”

McCree sighed, rolling his eyes.

“Alright. Is it that thing I don’t know about?”

“Partially.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Just me.” He shook his head. “Go spend time with your family, kid. We’re wheels up tomorrow night.”

“What’s it look like I’m doin’?”

Gabriel reached up and ruffled McCree’s hair, relenting only when he started swatting at Gabriel’s arm.

“You’re a little shit, you know that?”

“Me? Never.”

“I’m just worried, is all.”

“Again, boss. What about?”

“The usual. Mission shit, U.N. shit, getting people killed. Wishing you’d go to college, or be a mechanic, or something normal like that. Be a civvie, stop getting shot all the damn time.”

“Could you?”

He leaned up against the counter, sighing and gnawing at the raw spot on his lip he’d been tearing apart since last Tuesday. 

“No, I couldn’t. I know, kid, you can’t either. I’m still gonna worry.” 

McCree propped himself against the counter in turn, his stance mirroring Gabriel’s. 

“You’re gonna go grey, is what you’re gonna do.”

They stood there in silence, for a while. Once the last of the afternoon’s warmth started to fade, the house filled up again, Deborah and Louise bolting around the living room with a seemingly limitless energy in their attempts to convince Raúl they weren’t tired yet. He managed to coax them into going to bed only once he’d promised to read a chapter of the latest book Soledad had picked out for them, and Cora remained stubbornly attached to Maria’s chest, face buried in her neck and fists loosely curled in her shirt as she drooled a spot on her mother’s collar, but Maria didn’t seem to mind. 

“So, Gabriel.”

He looked up from a mission report to find Soledad staring at him, sitting on the floor and boxed in by Duke’s knees as he made a valiant effort to comb through her hair and braid it back together to keep it from tangling overnight. 

“Yeah?”

“What are your missions like?”

“Soledad, stop digging for government secrets,” Duke sighed, but Gabriel waved him off.

“It’s fine, she’s smart. They’re mostly the same as your brother’s.”

“Jesse won’t tell us about his.”

“I don’t wanna worry anyone!”

Every eye in the room shot him a dry look.

“Any _more_. And I didn’t mean to in the first place, I just--”

“Did.”

“For five years.”

“In a gang.”

“Kid, you still worry me.”

McCree shrunk down in his seat, but Gabriel ruffled his hair as good-naturedly as possible to keep him from sulking.

“But you were asking, Soledad?”

“I mean. Jesse says you guys have cool uniforms.”

“We do.”

“How many guns can you fit on ‘em?”

“ _Soledad!_ ”

“What? It’s a legitimate question, papá.”

Gabriel snorted. 

“Max of sixteen, depending on the size.”

“You really carry around that many on a mission? That sounds like it wouldn’t be stealthy. At all.”

“Oh, fu--hell no. Everyone has a different setup they like to stick to, with the number and type of weapon, and all that.”

“What’s yours?”

“Two shotguns, two pistols. Eight extra clips for each gun.”

Maria nodded, and it almost looked impressed. 

“Jesse?”

“Uh. Usually only three. Pair of pistols ‘n a small millimeter pulse rifle, the lighter kind. As many extra mags as I can carry without soundin’ like a rattle.”

“What happens if you run out anyway?” Duke asked.

“I ask for someone else’s. And if not, we got knives, still.”

“How many of those can you carry?” Soledad asked.

When McCree threw him a lost look, Gabriel took over.

“Can fit twenty-nine on the uniform, if you pack the small ones.”

“Yeah, but how many do you carry around?”

McCree bit his lip, and Gabriel coughed a little into his fist.

“On missions, usually, or now?”

Duke’s eyebrows hit his hairline, but Soledad was the only one who kept speaking. 

“All of ‘em.”

“Six on missions, four on base, and, uh. Two right now.”

“You know you’re safe here, Gabriel,” Duke offered.

“I know, it’s just. Force of habit.” 

McCree shrunk into the sofa, pointedly staring at the floor. Maria raised an eyebrow.

“Jesse? Your sister asked you a question.” 

“I carry...uh. Eight on missions and four on base, like Gabe.”

“And now?”

“Uh...”

“Jesse McCree. You told me you weren’t armed.”

“It’s only one knife, ma! Come on! Like you don’t keep one in your pocket.”

“That’s when I’m outside the house.”

“We have a gun hangin’ off the wall!”

“But I don’t _wear_ it.”

“Maria, dear, you do sleep with a knife under the alarm clock.”

“Of course I do, Duke. I’m just giving him a hard time.”

“Y’all are terrible.”

“Wait, where do you even keep those?” Soledad’s face crunched up in disgust. “Wait. Do I want to know?”

Gabriel drew the first knife from the sheath around his chest, blade tucked against his ribs, just below his armpit. He rolled up the cuff of his jeans and procured the second much the same, both small and generally less heavy-duty than he preferred. McCree reached back and produced the knife Kvonch had given him back in Grand Mesa, well-worn around the grip but still pristine in the glossy line of the blade. Meaner than the ones Gabriel was carrying, a little bulkier and viciously toothed along the edge, more of a survival knife than a combat one.

“I have another in my shoe,” Gabriel admitted. “Bet my life Jesse’s got one, too.”

“ _Gabe_.”

“Your mother asked.”

“Smart man,” Maria said. 

“Woah. Jesse, can I see?”

McCree got up from his spot on the couch and handed the blade over to his sister, settling down on the floor before her, their knees knocking together as Soledad shifted in place to give Duke better access to the ends of her hair. The resemblance between Soledad and McCree was striking, almost as much so as that between Maria and Raúl, or Deborah and Louise, the two made distinct by the lingering baby fat on Soledad’s cheeks and frame, a few months younger than Fareeha. She’d had her quinceñera only about a month ago; a loud, colorful party was held in the backyard and sung through with the music of crickets in the grass. Gabriel’d helped Duke sew together the dress she wore, bright and flowing like the cactus flowers that dotted the desert. 

“Hey, be careful.”

“I’m not dumb, Jess.”

“Naw, I know that. Just. Y’ain’t holdin’ it right.”

“Like a knife?”

“No. Well, yeah. You’re holdin’ it like a kitchen knife. That’s a combat knife, ‘n you don’t hold those the same. Here.” He took her hands in his own and fixed their place on the handle, careful and deliberate the same as he was with Fareeha, and never with himself. Gabriel shook his head.

“Jesus, kid, why are you keeping _eight_ on you, anyway? I’ve never seen you run out of ammo.”

“Naw, but it’s good to have backup.”

“Eight of them?”

“Robin said I didn’t carry enough!”

“You’re taking knife advice from _Robin_? Jesse, he’s an assassin. He keeps a knife under his tongue.”

“Woah, what?” Soledad gasped. “Like, an actual assassin?”

“You never heard me say that.”

“Obviously not. So who’s Robin?”

Maria snorted, getting to her feet with a creak of protest from her prosthetic, smooth but worn metal and silicon starting just below her right knee and giving her the smallest hint of a limp. She hefted Cora up higher on her chest and rolled her eyes, toeing McCree’s knee as she passed him and climbed up the stairs. 

“Another agent, is all.”

“And he’s a real-life, actual assassin?”

“Among other things, sure.”

“He’s a prima-donna,” McCree cut in, and Gabriel didn’t correct him. 

“Woah.”

Soledad handed the knife back to McCree, who returned it to whatever pocket or seam he was hiding it in before. Maria came back down the stairs and chased Soledad up to bed, done shepherding one daughter to sleep proper and now moving on to the next. 

Gabriel followed suit, giving McCree some time with his parents before they left tomorrow, ghosting as softly as he could past the half-open doors of the upstairs so as not to wake anyone. Raúl was snoring, visible from the hallway with a book open on his chest and both Deborah and Louise packed into the bottom bunk, the three of them fitting onto the tiny mattress by some mix of godlike luck and dexterity alike. The light was still on under the door one over, Soledad’s name clumsily painted onto a piece of cardboard that hung off the wood, right below a similarly-juvenile tag of ‘Jesse,’ complete with a seven-legged dog and sloppy handprint cut off at the corner. Charming in the same way everything about the McCree’s was, in that it demanded to be seen; proof that someone had existed and was impossible to forget. It was a lot like the knick-knacks and worthless objects that dotted the insides of Blackwatch buildings, photos and love letters tucked away in every corner to be found and recalled by someone new. The desperate attempts of ghosts to be seen, he supposed.

-

“You’re sure you’re gonna be alright, Jesse?”

“Yea, pa. I always am.”

“But what if--”

“Duke.” Mamá said. “Let him be.”

“I know, sunrise… I just worry.”

Jesse ducked his head, absently picking at his arm until mamá batted his hand away.

“‘M sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” Mamá grabbed his chin, pulling his head up to look her in the eyes. “Have I ever apologized for serving?”

“No, but you didn’t--”

“I didn’t have you? Or Duke? Ada?” Jesse flinched at hearing her name, and papá smoothed a hand over his hair. “If I was still in the service, would you want me to apologize for it?”

“No.”

“Then you shouldn’t apologize, either.”

Jesse shook his head, leaning his face into her hand. They were calloused and cool, same as they always had been, as long as he could remember. 

“I just. I. I’m gonna come home, okay? ‘M not gonna…. Not gonna put y’all through that again.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

“You call us, okay?”

“I know, papá. Before I deploy, and after I come back.”

“And whenever else you want to! You’re not bothering us if--”

“Duke.”

“Right, right.”

Papá hesitated for just a moment before he dragged Jesse from his spot on the couch and into his arms, catching mamá with him to hold them against his chest as if he could shield them from the world. Jesse let himself feel small, for a moment, wrapped in his father’s arms and feeling his steady heartbeat thump against his ear as mamá carded fingers through his hair. 

Of course he would come home. If he died somewhere, now, his family would know about it, and his death would have real repercussions. It was both a blessing and a curse to come back; he could see his sisters grow, tell his parents how much he loved them, try to protect his nieces and uncle from the woman that hurt them, be there for all of them when they needed it. Right his wrongs. But now, his life had a consequence. If he died, he would be missed with the same sore agony that Jesse, himself, felt when he thought about Ada-- he could be the catalyst that pushed Soledad, or Cora, or the twins to turn out like him. He couldn’t be so reckless, anymore. 

Jesse was _good_ at being Blackwatch, was the thing. He didn’t want to leave, because Blackwatch made him feel talented, like he was something more than a lucky mistake, like he could be someone worth being proud of. He liked the idea of being worth something other than the numbers on a wanted poster, and fighting for a good cause rather than an ugly survival was really, really nice. He might not have been a hero, by any means, but he could be something for his family to be proud of, Gabe included, and that was enough for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank yall again for bein so kind n patient w me all the time, youre all a bunch of sweethearts n u make my day and a half!!!


	27. 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yallve been so patient w me and i cant say how much i appreciate it!!! big chapter 4 ya lads
> 
> next chap will b some scientist chats and then.........IM LIKE 73% SURE..GENJI

Nakano stood to his left, fidgeting and tense with restless energy, and Defranco was at his right, back straight with all the learnt control of a soldier. They stood out something fierce in the little diner, despite all Jesse had done to make himself look like a reasonably-tired college student. Nakano and Defranco were born and built for shootouts, more than anything, not much for the interim between arrival and striking time, and while Jesse and Kaufman tried to dress them into looking more civilian, Blackwatch still shone through their skin; it was visible in Defranco’s ramrod spine and Nakano’s flickering eyes, glancing from door to window and back with every inhale she took, the way their fingers drummed against their hips where a gun should be. Jesse was doing the same thing, of course, but he at least tried to be a little more subtle about it. 

Beside him, Defranco winced.

“Fuck. What did Kaufman want, again?”

“An omelette, right? Hold the tomatoes.”

“No, no,” Nakano said. “She wanted to hold the green onions, not the tomatoes.”

“You’re sure? That don’t sound right.”

“Shit. Shit, goddamn it. We should have wrote it down. Fuck.”

Behind them, the bell above the door tinkled and a young man stepped in, balancing a toddler on his hip and a newspaper between his teeth. He flashed them a polite smile as he did so, nervously eking past their huddled mass to pick a table. Jesse noted the waitress serving the breakfast bar eyeing them again, and he was pretty sure she’d chase them out if they didn’t sit down soon. 

“It’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Defranco and Nakano trailed him like lost, feral dogs as he hunted about for an open seat, picking one close to the emergency exit with a solid view of the diner at large and heavy oak booths. 

“You’re sure she didn’t want tomatoes?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“She said green onions, I’m telling you!”

“I eat breakfast with her more than you do! Trust me.”

“I still don’t get why Kaufman didn’t go get breakfast, herself. She’s Robin’s! He actually trained her for this stuff.”

“Y’all can buy fuckin’ breakfast. This ain’t deep cover, or anything.”

They’d run out of eggs at the safehouse yesterday, and the closest grocery store didn’t open up until ten on Sundays, which meant the six of them all drew straws, and it was Nakano who got stuck with the breakfast run. Defranco wouldn’t let her go alone because she ‘would kill somebody,’ and both Jesse and Kaufman highly doubted the pair’s ability to function in non-Blackwatch social settings, so here he was, twiddling his thumbs like a dumbass at eight A.M. sharp, packed into a quiet but homely little diner in the shittiest part of town. 

Of course, being in a shitty part of town made it much easier to intercept the weapons deal they were here to ruin, and the people were both polite and smart enough not to ask questions about the strange tenants who came in and out of the shoddy old house on Jefferson St. 

Jesse was stationed there with Nakano, Defranco, Kaufman, Idowu, and Maksimovich while they waited for their intel to prove true-- a week early, just in case dates were moved forward due to antsy buyers or sellers looking to take some heat off their backs. Supposedly, one of Blackwatch’s many ears had heard about the deal some months ago, but it wasn’t until recently that the same was corroborated by another and traced back to a real organization. Some pharmaceutical front was buying up a strange number of properties in the ghostly outskirts of Chicago, mostly vacated as people moved into the heart of the city or out to the countryside after the Crisis. The dusty streets and crumbling buildings were greatly favored by an odd mix of people, mostly broke students or teachers attending the nearby university, pocked here and there with someone’s elderly grandmother who’d since adopted the block’s inhabitants or veterans looking for a quieter side of town. The people were nice, but the neighborhood had gained an increasingly foul reputation since Healthful Horizons had started worming their way into the old shops. The population in the area had an odd, frighteningly abrupt spike in number at the same time, accompanied by a near-instantaneous plague of organized crime that had sucked what little life roamed the streets dry. Defranco said he’d been on a mission here before Healthful Horizons had made its sudden appearance, and that the asphalt had been lively with neighbors playing basketball on the painted median, occasional barbeques or potlucks held in the front yard of someone’s home, bright and intact against the dilapidated, empty ones beside it. Jesse had yet to see anyone out past sunset.

“Hello, hello.”

Jesse looked up from the menu to find himself staring in the neat, shiny face of an omnic, her-- and Jesse thought it was a her, judging by the timbre of her voice and loose skirt about her knees-- optical sensors modded bright green and arms engraved with swooping, shiny designs like lace. Briefly, the air tasted like dust in his mouth.

“ _Listen, Harley-Davidson, I’m not gonna hang around here forever. Gonna skip town, pack up shop, and haul ass as far away from this canyon as the good lord’ll take me. Any lord, for that matter, I don’t care. So long as I’m out. I guess you can come, too. As long as you don’t slow me down, y’know? It’d be nice-- useful, I mean-- to have you._ ”

For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, too focused on the familiar twist of wires down the omnic’s neck and the shape of the hydraulics that built her shoulders, the same make and model as Danny’s. Her faceplate and audio filter were different, at least, and that might have been the only thing that kept him from crying. 

“Good morning! Didn’t see you guys come in. Anyone serve you yet?”

Defranco opened his mouth to speak, but Jesse beat him to the punch, neatly clipping out the twang in his words and matching it to her own intonation as best he could. It was selfish of him to clamor for her attention as if she were someone else, but he tried to justify it under the pretense of keeping her distracted, ignorant of the excess of scar tissue that painted all three of their faces and how all of it was born from violence. 

“No, we just got here. I love your stencils, by the way. Are those laser or water cut? They look really clean.”

The omnic-- Estrella, her nametag said-- brightened instantly, sticking out her arm to him and swaying on her feet, bouncing a little on her toes. “Water cut, actually! I got them last month. I’m kinda surprised you know there’s a difference, to be honest.”

“ _Yeah, there’s a fuckin’ difference. This one’s laser cut, see? It’s got the color on it from the heat tempering. Water cuts-- like this one-- don't have that._ ”

“I’m trying to get into the industry,” he lied. 

“Cool! Are you a student around here?”

“Yeah. I’m in my second year, right now.”

“I’m in my third. Business major, as thrilling as it sounds.”

“Hey, whatever makes you happy, right?”

Nakano and Defranco were staring a hole into his head, but Jesse ignored them.

“Yeah! But seriously, I should get you guys something to eat before your friends starve to death.”

“Don’t worry about it. They’re resilient.”

Estrella tipped her head back and laughed, odd but achingly familiar in the tinny ring of her voice and the steady rise and fall of her chest, unbothered by the laughter that didn’t come from her lungs, but the synthesizer in her throat. Jesse thought it was charming, in an odd sort of way, but he caught Defranco making a face out of the corner of his eye. 

“I held you up plenty, already, though, so I’ll guess I’ll order something.”

“Makes the cooks’ jobs easier, that way.”

He grinned at her for a moment before looking down at his menu.

“Can I get the ham and potatoes, please? Extra orange slices on the side, too, if you can swing it.”

“You’re asking a lot from me, you know.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got contacts on the inside.”

She snorted and took the note down on her pad, optics flickering like they were crunched up by her smiling. 

“And you, Flowerchild?”

Defranco blinked.

“Flowerchild?”

“You know. Because of the rose you’ve got, there.” She tapped the back of her head with her pen, but the longer Defranco stared her down, the softer her voice became. He was looking at her a little like she’d asked him about his dental history, in a that’s-weird-but-okay-I-guess, kind of way, and Estrella was starting to look very much like she regretted speaking at all. Jesse pressed the steel toe of his shoe into Defranco’s shin. For moral support.

“Oh, uh. Ha. Ha-ha. Can I get a soup?”

“What soup do you--”

“Whatever, uh. Soup. I love soup.”

“Mm... okay! And you?”

“Pancakes! The ones with the chocolate chips. The good shit! Stuff, I mean. Good stuff.”

Estrella loosened up a little, and Jesse grinned at her, giving Nakano a playful shove across the table.

“Smooth, Momoka. Oh! Can we also get a, uh… omelette with no tomatoes, two breakfast sandwiches, and an oatmeal? All to go, please.”

“Having a party?”

“Obviously. There’s breakfast sandwiches involved.”

Estrella laughed again, shaking her head as she tore away the paper order and headed back to the kitchen. As soon as she was out of earshot, Nakano and Defranco both rounded on him, eyes wide.

“What the fuck was that?”  
“What was what?”  
“The accent thing? I never even knew you could do that!”  
“You looked like you were gonna start, like, crying. And you know my name’s not Momoka, right?”

“Yeah. Did you know them, or something?”

_Smooth silver painted black and gold, scratched and dented and buffed shiny by the sand whipped up by the wind, voice like danger and eyes the color of the sunset off the baked earth. Finger joints that creaked in the cold of the night, metal that burned in the sweetest way as it sat under the sun and glowed like armor._

“Naw.”

Both narrowed their eyes at him, but didn’t press. 

“Anyways, if you’re done being weird,” Below the table, Nakano tapped her foot against the side of Jesse’s, twice and deliberate. “Sorera o miru.”

He blinked at her, running the words through his head a few times before they made sense. He’d picked up a solid chunk of the language from her and Montreal, but it took him a moment to think through it. 

“Doko?”

“Hidari no tēburu.”

Jesse put his head on his hand, tipping it to the side where he could get a solid view of the table next to theirs from his peripheries. He hadn’t noticed them until now, too preoccupied with Estrella, and he kicked himself for the rookie mistake. The people at the table were shooting them odd glances, each with only one hand on the table. There were four of them, all similarly shifty-eyed and antsy like Jesse’s own company. One started tapping their foot against the linoleum as Jesse and Nakano switched languages, likely frustrated by being unable to understand the conversation. They weren’t particularly subtle, either, one openly staring holes into Defranco’s skull with a look that very much implied a desire to see a bullet in it.

Jesse flipped the switch on the communicator in his ear under the guise of tucking back a piece of hair and waited for the tinny feedback of the connection going through before he knocked Defranco’s foot with his own, who in turn drummed his fingers against the table, once for each hostile, sending out a hail Mary in scratched oak resin.  
“Mccree?” Kaufman asked over the comm. “Are you in trouble?” 

When he failed to answer, she continued.

“We’ll deploy in four seconds, if you don’t respond.”

Jesse leaned back in his chair and made a show of stacking creamer cups with Nakano. 

“En route.”

Defranco was more openly on edge, eyes glued on one of the table’s occupants in return, moving one of his hands to rest out of sight and in easy reach of his gun. Nakano was breathing far too quickly for stacking creamers, but she at least had the restraint to keep both her hands in plain sight. Ideally, they could hold off a firefight until they left the diner, keep it to the backalleys and empty streets where no one would get hurt; the diner had at least seven civilians, eleven if he counted the waitresses and the cook, and with seven shooters, someone was bound to get hurt. 

It was at that precise moment Estrella spun out of the kitchen, balancing a motley of boxes on her arms and headed directly for Jesse with a spring in her step. A distant part of him was thrilled to have backup, but the far greater part reminded him that the resemblance stopped at the structure of metal that made up her body, and that she was in no way ready for a firefight. He forced his dread into a false grin that he shot her way, void of humor and far from reaching his eyes. Estrella paused, and Jesse shook his head at her, if only slightly. 

She kept walking. Jesse admired her bravery, even if he wished she were more of a coward as she reached into the pocket of her apron and made Jesse’s heart stop in his chest. He caught sight of the bright orange cap of a can of pepper spray before one of the opposite table’s occupants moved, and Jesse was out of his seat in the same second that Nakano flipped their table to take cover behind it. He hooked an arm around Estrella’s middle as the first gunshot went off, barreling them both to the floor and behind a booth where she couldn’t be hit by the remaining gunners.

“Everybody down!” he shouted, though the gunshots that rang through the space made it a little unnecessary. Regardless, he grabbed a chair from the table nearby and hurled it as hard as he could, shattering the window between a family and the man with his toddler, barking out a sharp “Go!” as one woman hopped through the broken frame, offering her arms to the man, who handed her the toddler and helped barrel one of her children over the sharp edges of the window and into her embrace. One of the shooters turned to the noise, but Jesse caught them in the head with his pistol before they could get any shots off.

“Estrella!” one of the waitresses shrieked, half-ducked behind the breakfast bar in the front. Jesse chanced a glance down at the omnic beside him and felt his blood run cold to see her leaking bright blue coolant over the floor, her chest heaving like she was choking. 

The last shooter hit the floor and Nakano cupped her hands to her mouth. “Is anyone hurt?” she asked, at the same time Jesse hooked his arms under Estrella’s knees and hefted her up off the floor, scrambling over to her coworker and laying her on the bar. Estrella cried out when Jesse set her down, voice warbling and reedy from her throat as she failed to force her body to function.

“You know how to stabilize her?”

“N-no! Please, please don’t hurt us.”

“Don’t leave me here,” Estrella begged. “I don’t want to die.”

Jesse grabbed her hand as an afterthought, pointing at her shivering coworker.

“Get me the maintenance kit. Now!” he added, when the waitress remained frozen to the spot. Distantly, he could hear shouting. Seemed like he was right to assume their unfriendly neighbors came with backup close by

“Mcccree, we have to go.”

“And leave her here to bleed out? The fuck’s wrong with you? Civilian safety first.”

“She’s an omnic waitress, not a civilian! Come on, we need to meet with Kaufman and get somewhere with an advantage!”

“Not a _civilian_? Defranco--”

The waitress scrambled back out from the kitchen, a white box clutched in her hands and mascara dripping down her cheeks. Jesse took it from her and drew his knife in the same motion, cutting open the front of Estrella’s uniform and tearing the fabric away. Just below her left chestplate, a warped hole had been punched through the metal, sticky and acrid with the coolant that flowed from somewhere within. 

_”Breathe, Jesse, okay? It’s, uh, it’s fine. I-I need you to cut through… cut through the big white tube on the left. Either side of where the bullet clipped. Now, take the tape and-- ow, okay, fuck-- that’s good, wrap it together. There’s a green wire you gotta reconnect… you gotta, uh… So long as the fan keeps going, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”_

Cut through the chassis. Find the bullet. Maintain coolant pressure. Keep the fan running.

The kit was armed with a pair of needlenose pliers, a handheld laser cutter, and a roll of electrical tape, among other things he was far too inexperienced to use, and his hands shook as he powered on the laser to cut through the plating of Estrella’s chest. The hole he carved out was ugly, but big enough to work in, and he dug the pliers into the mechanisms beneath to yank out the bullet lodged in her fan, having knocked it from its axis and rendered it motionless. All the while, Estrella’s frightened weeping grew quieter.

_”That’s bad.”_

His hand slipped on the jagged edge of metal and split open, smearing blood over her metal sternum and stinging where coolant leaked between his skin. He clumsily bent the fan blade back into a shape resembling its original one, still oddly warped and pocked where the bullet had made its home in the sheeting, but enough that it could spin without getting caught on anything. He cracked the back of the laser cutter slamming it into the head of the axis, but the cap clicked back into place and the fan went back to spinning again. The coolant pumped from Estrella’s system with a renewed vigor, but it meant the pressure was coming back, at least, and that was a good thing.

The point where the coolant tube had torn was hardly a graze, but enough to pop open the silicon and loose blue fluid like arterial spray, which wasn’t too far off from the truth. Not too big for him to tape together as it was, though he would have struggled to keep his slippery hands in place, had the other waitress not ducked under his arm and held the tube steady. The tape held fast, and the blue puddle forming under Estrella’s body stopped growing in diameter. Her little gasps grow stronger as her pressure stabilized and her fan started generating power again, and Jesse could have cried with relief. 

_He had, before, dropped his head onto Danny’s sticky, stinking collarbone and sobbed as his systems picked up speed and returned to a more natural rhythm, still gaping open and exposed to the world outside._

_“Didn’t think you’d miss me that much, Eastwood.”_

He’d have probably stayed there, breathing almost as heavily as Estrella was, had Nakano not grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled, wrenching him back hard enough to make him reach back and shove her off on instinct.

“If we don’t go soon, Mccree, she’s not gonna be the only one to get hit.”

Jesse nodded and grabbed one of the waitresses hands, making her squeak in surprise as she, too, fought off the shock. He hastily tangled it with one of Estrella’s and squeezed their clasped hands, once, before scrambling out of the diner with Nakano hot on his heels.

“Keep the the tape on until someone can help,” he gasped over his shoulder and spilled into the alley where Defranco waited, back to the brick building beside them and pistol in hand. 

“Done playing mechanic?” he snapped, and all the frantic adrenaline bouncing in Jesse’s limbs turned to kerosene.

“I saved her life,” he snarled back, spiked with more vehemence than he’d felt in a long time. 

“Shut up, both of you! The rookies are coming around the corner!”

True to her word, the howl of motorbikes tore through the street in stereo, packed together in tight formation and clad all in black, shrieking to an unsteady stop in front of the diner in a spray of shredded asphalt. Maksimovich leapt off her bike and up onto the back of Idowu’s without being asked or invited, and Nakano swung into place on the vacated seat like she’d been born there, Defranco clamoring up behind her. Jesse took his cue and hopped behind Kaufman, popping on the offered motorcycle helmet and snatching the second assault rifle strapped to her back. 

“Hang on,” Nakano shouted, and he looked up. “Mccree, I want you with me.” 

Defranco spluttered, but went easily enough when Nakano elbowed him away,trading places with Jesse and checking his shoulder as he passed. Jesse leered back at him.

Nakano led their caravan, this time, peeling out into the street with the scream of the engines at the same moment an ugly, green van swerved out of the parking garage at the bottom of the block, already with a figure hanging out the window.

“I’m taking them out into the dead zone,” Nakano said, tinny over the comms. “Mccree, you ever shot off the back of a cycle before?”

Jesse half-stood in his seat, pressing his knees against her sides and steadying a hand on her shoulder to keep himself upright. She glanced back at him only momentarily before returning her attention to the road, letting him lean against her back to better maintain his balance.

“Once or twice.”

He felt, more than heard Nakano’s laughter as she revved the accelerator, tearing ahead and splitting left from the caravan. 

“Idowu, you and Kaufman split off into the alleyways.” Defranco pointed to the next block ahead, barely before the street forked in two. “The city’s set up in grids, so we can flank the van.”

“Got it.”

The two bikes peeled off as Nakano hit the brakes and swung into a U-turn, billowing exhaust and making the machine bellow like some hungering monster.

“Ready, cowboy?”

Jesse took stock of the fury still itching under his skin and rolled his shoulders, leaning into the turn.

“More than you’d think.”

“Let’s see how good Deadlock taught you.”

The words were like an evocation, throwing blood in the water and drawing out every bit of the ugly, rabid thing inside of him, and he felt the brand on his forearm burn up into his bones. Nakano gassed the bike up again and charged the van, Jesse hanging off of her with his automatic held like a jousting lance, trying to take down a thing of fables.

He lined up easy and pulled the trigger, spraying the side of the van with bullets and taking off one of the side mirrors as they came close, letting the wily kickback roll through him rather than try to fight it. As they roared closer, the gunner in the van stuck their head back out the window, pointing their own automatic at Nakano and firing. She swerved left, smooth as reflex, and Jesse leaned into her as she did, waiting until they came closer to lay down on the trigger again, shredding through the gunner and trying to avoid watching as they slumped into the street. He didn’t let up as they passed the front seat, and he would have taken out the driver, too, had they not been smart enough to duck down in their seat. The heavy _chunk_ of bullets hitting the side doors informed him that the van was armored at least a little, and he swore under his breath. As Nakano passed the window, Idowu and Kaufman exploded from the alleyway ahead of them, rolling up on either side of the van and maintaining speed long enough for Maksimovich and Defranco to blow out the front tires. Defranco snarled out a litany of curses as someone inside tore open the side door and caught him in the calf with a bullet, but didn’t let up, trading shots with the gunners in the van’s belly.

“‘Nother pass and I’m gonna be out of ammo,” Jesse warned.

“Got any other tricks up your sleeves?” Nakano asked.

“Got a flashbang in my jeans.”

“You keep a grenade next to your _dick_?”

“More useful than a plain-ass packer, isn’t it?”

Nakano cackled, loud and dangerous as she tore into another turn, looping around to charge the back of the van. 

“Peel off! We’re gonna do something stupid!”

Kaufman and Idowu barked an affirmative and took to the alleys again at the same time Nakano threw herself into the gas, launching their cycle up alongside the van as Jesse shattered the back window with lead. When they pulled up against the gunner window, Jesse hurled his flashbang into the driver’s lap and dropped back down into his seat, clinging to Nakano’s middle as she nearly brushed the ground turning them into the alleyway nearest them. A moment later, there was a loud crack and the van lost control, screaming on its brakes and slamming into the stained brick wall of a building up the street. 

Still, with the reinforced body of the vehicle, its passengers were likely still (mostly) intact, and Jesse said as much into the comms, his own voice coming out meaner than he remembered it being. Nakano stopped the bike and pulled out the pistol under her shirt, ducking behind one of the rusted, old cars that lined the street and taking aim on their unfriendly neighbors.

He caught sight of Idowu, Maksimovich, Defranco, and Kaufman doing the same across the street, and Jesse drew his gun, sidling up against Nakano’s side and aiming through the since-broken windows of the car. 

Predictably, the van’s door split open, and out poured a handful of gunners, disoriented but furious, swinging their guns in seeking arcs for the Blackwatch agents that hunted them. Jesse didn’t give them a chance to target before he pulled the trigger, dropping one figure to the asphalt and sending the others into a wild frenzy of shooting at anything they saw. Kaufman caught another and Defranco followed suit, two more bodies slumping to the ground and staining the road bloody. Very distantly, Jesse could hear sirens from the direction of the city, likely led by the cracking of gunshots bouncing between the old buildings, echoing and ghoulish.

“We’re compromised,” Idowu gasped into his comm. “Defranco’s hit, and we need extraction.”

Their stationary handler for the mission was a woman named Svetsky, who responded with a voice like velvet and polished steel.

“Define compromised.”

“Getting fucking shot at! A lot!” 

“Maksimovich is correct,” Kaufman said. “After an altercation like this, it is extremely unlikely that the weapons deal will go through.” 

“‘Unlikely’ doesn’t mean ‘it won’t’. Defranco, status?” 

“Clipped in my calf. Mobility’s shit, but I’m not fucking dying, yet.”

“Return to the safehouse as soon as possible and comprise a report. Continue as planned unless I say otherwise.”

Jesse nailed another gunner as they all echoed an affirmative, and the remaining enemies started to scatter, scrambling into alleyways and firing blind over their shoulders in an attempt to escape. They didn’t get far. Before he had a chance to breathe, Nakano grabbed Jesse by the back of the shirt again and hauled him upright, swinging him into the bike seat behind her as she revved the engine and tore into the road, followed shortly by Kaufman and Idowu. They drove the bikes into their designated parking garage two blocks up from the safehouse, where Idowu hopped into the driver’s seat of an old Subaru, maintaining an easy, lax speed until he pulled into the safehouse garage, despite the sweat that dripped down his temples. Nakano hooked an arm under Defranco as he spilled from the backseat, furious and snarling.

“Happy now, Mccree? Mission’s fucked, and it’s your fault.”

“Shut up, Defranco,” Nakano barked. Jesse rose to the bait despite her efforts to stop them, curling his lip.

“It was civilian safety!”

“It was an omnic waitress. There’s a hundred more of her downtown, and a hundred more outside the city!”

Idowu gaped at him, and Kaufman fell very still, carefully surveying them both. Maksimovich looked at Jesse. 

“She’s still a fuckin’ person!”

“No, she’s not! She’s a robot!”

“What difference does that make?”

“She’s not alive!”

“So I was just supposed to leave her there? She was _crying_!”

“No, she wasn’t! She’s a fucking machine, Mccree! She can’t cry! Machines don’t feel!”

_Danny, furious and screaming as they ripped him from Jesse’s arms, anger so hot it made his synthesizer shriek with static. He bellowed rage when they pinned Jesse down, thrashed in their arms and scratched at their eyes when they cuffed him to their bunk, and he went still when they put a gun to Jesse’s head._

_“That’s it. One more time, kid, and I’ll blow his brains out.”_

_Danny was terrified when he slumped in their grasp, letting their horrible hands cling like mud to his shining chest, dirtying his beautiful stencils and their heat-tempered colors. He couldn’t cry, but his voice shook like he was when he said ‘I love you’ in four words rather than three, defeated and broken by what was supposed to make them both stronger._

_“Good luck, Harley-Davidson.”_

Jesse saw red. Deadlock spilled off his lips, dripped from his fingers as he drew his knife and lunged for Defranco, stopped only by Maksimovich hooking him under the armpits.

“Cut your fuckin’ eyes out, you can’t cry either!” he snarled, distantly nauseated by the spittle that flew from his mouth as he spat the words like the bullets from his gun. “See how human you are when I cut you in fuckin’ pieces!” 

As soon as the words left his lips, Jesse wished he could take them back. Defranco recoiled from him, Nakano supporting him with one arm and letting the other rest on her gun as if she expected to have to stop him. To put him down like a rabid animal, and maybe he was one, looking at the knife white-knuckled in his grip and the strength with which he fought against Maksimovich’s grip. Idowu had ducked against the car as if he was seeking shelter, and even Kaufman had stepped away from him, if only a little. Jesse dropped the knife as he felt his own horror crawl up his face, mirrored in those around him. The fire in his throat turned to icy shame as his insides thrashed against each other in disgust of themselves, and he very narrowly managed to fling himself from Maksimovich’s arms before he wretched, stumbling out the door to the backyard and promptly vacating his stomach on the roots of the oak tree that lived between the grass.

The brand on Jesse’s skin burned, and he wished he could cut it away, sear the skin flat and shiny and destroy the inked scar tissue beneath it. As if it would help. As if Deadlock would ever leave him. It didn’t stop him from tearing at the black skull with his fingernails, desperately trying to scrape out the poison that lived inside of him and going so far to try and attack it with his teeth, the skin tasting like iron, coolant, and gasoline that burned the inside of his nose and made his eyes water. 

_You’re not one of them, anymore,_ the rational part of him insisted, and it sounded a lot like his mother. 

He spat his arm out of his mouth and wiped it on his shirt.

Defranco probably hated him, now. Hated the way he talked and the violence that lived under his flesh and his inability to know when to quit. Nakano would have killed him if he went through on his threat, and even if he didn’t, she might never trust him again. Kaufman and Idowu looked like they were afraid of him, and the thought made his eyes water as he slumped against the tree and sank to the ground, opposite the side he’d been sick on. His hand stung, his arm stung, his eyes stung. 

A leaf fell from the tree and landed on his shoe, bloody with gore and Estrella’s coolant. Maybe he was a monster. But he wasn’t Deadlock’s monster, anymore, and that had to be better than nothing. He pushed a hand through his hair, dusty and sticking in places where it had gummed up with sweat and gore. Gabe believed he was worthwhile, and that meant he couldn’t be all bad, right? His sisters still loved him. Mina still let him buy her peaches. 

He stretched his arm out in front of him and looked at the raw, puffy surface of his tattoo, beading blood where he had dug into it the deepest. 

“Yo.”

He flinched as Nakano flopped to the ground in front of him.

“Hey.”

“You do that?” she asked, and pointed at the sticky swell of his forearm, though with his teeth imprinted into it, the answer was clear.

“Don’t tell Reyes?”

She pulled up her shirt, and it wasn’t until now that Jesse noticed how deliberate the arcs of scarring were over the kanji there. 

“I won’t if you won’t.”

“Hell. I’m sorry, Nakano. I fucked up. Wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want me around, anymore.” 

Nakano snorted.

“Rirakkusu. It happens. I do shit like this all the time. It’s easier when I hang out with Montreal. They get it. Defranco, too-- he’s, like, an expert at getting threatened by people.”

“He looked scared of me.”

“Uh, yeah? That was scary, dude. Like, it was super metal, but in the kind of way where you piss a little.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged.

“Old habits. You’re not the first. And in your defense, you were, like, completely in murder mode, and that was more my fault.”

Jesse threw her a look, and she laughed, a little nervous.

“Don’t look at me like that. You look just like Reyes. But seriously, this happens a the time.” She dropped her voice to little more than a whisper, and shoved a hand into her hair, glancing back at the garage door. “I did it to Soares, once. Pulled a knife on her.”

“Hey, uh, quick question: how the fuck are you alive?”

“That’s what I said!”

“What did she do?”

“She, um… she came and talked to me, actually. I mean, after she used my ass to mop the floor. I forgot most of it, but it went, like, ‘blah blah, hey Nakano, wear it like the rest of your scars.’ The tattoo-gang-stuff, I mean. ‘Be proud of surviving it, ‘cause it’s a part of you just like everything else.’ Pretty poetic, actually.”

Jesse dropped his head on his knee and exhaled, staring past Nakano at something distant. He expected the hateful thorns in his chest, anticipated the burning shame and fury that made him wish he was dead, if only to make him feel like less of a failure. Felt out of place when they didn’t come. He felt guilty, sure, but not in the way that ripped apart, less like hatred and more like an apology. He fucked up, but it was fixable. He could learn to be better, and prevent it from happening again. A step in the right direction. Deadlock made him into a weapon, but now, Jesse held the trigger.

Idowu stuck his head out the door.

“Hey, uh. When you have a second, Nakano, I need someone to hold down Defranco so I can get the bullet out.”

He didn’t look at Jesse directly, but he did flash him the barest hint of a smile, if a nervous one. Still, it was more than nothing.

Nakano heaved herself upright and extended a hand down to Jesse, smiling the same brand of mischief and danger that Soares did, and maybe Jesse wore it, too, returning her grin the best he could as he swung his arm up and met her halfway, gritting his teeth against the sting of her hand clapping against his raw forearm, but taking solace in the way her palm blanketed the ink below, cool and soothing where he burned below the skin. 

Defranco sat with his hands braced on the back of the couch, leg propped up on the coffee table with his jaw locked tight as Idowu cut through the jeans he was wearing. He didn’t flinch when Jesse came close, and that surprised him more than he thought it would.

“That was a fucked up thing to say,” Defranco murmured. Jesse stared at the floor.

“I know. ‘M sorry.”

“No, not just you. I mean what I said. It bothered you and I kept at it. That was a dick move.”

“We’re real good at those, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. I think you were way dickier than I was, though.”

“Defranco,” Nakano groaned.

“What? I didn’t threaten to disoculate anyone!”

“Dis-- what? That’s not even a word!”

“It is too!”

“It is not a word,” Kaufman conceded, and Defranco would have jumped up to his own defense, were Nakano not bodily holding him down.

“Oh, fuck you! You understood what it meant, right?”

“That does not mean--”

Idowu looked up from his work in digging shrapnel out of the leg in his lap.

“I got it. I mean, aren’t all words just made up? If we can understand it, i think it counts.” Then, quieter. “You meant disoculate as ‘to remove someone’s eyes,’ right? I got that?”

“Just because you can say these things doesn’t mean you should.”

“Aw, come on, Max. No fun allowed!”

Defranco smacked Nakano’s shoulder, and she retaliated by biting his arm.

“Ha! I fucking told you! Mccree, back me up. I’m right.”

“Mccree, if you enable him, I’m telling on you.”

“Defranco’s wrong.”

“I’m _what_? I’ll disoculate you, you son of a bitch!”

“It’s not as scary when Defranco says it.”

“Yeah. Boo, bad threat.”

“Fuck off!”

“Defranco’s bad at threatening people, pass it on.”

“Does this count as plagiarism? Mccree, are you being plagiarized?”

“I’m pressing charges, yeah.”

Nakano cackled, leering away from Defranco’s furious thrashing and high fiving Jesse where he sat across from her. It was good that the safehouse was without neighbors, Jesse thought, as Defranco shrieked wordless fury at the ceiling, loud enough to warrant a 911 call, if anyone were close enough to hear it. It let them be a little more of themselves, in their own violent, caring sort of way. Despite being monstrous as it was, Blackwatch was still good, and it made Jesse think maybe he was, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again i cant thank u guys enough for how patient n kind ya are w me and i want yall to know how much yr comments mean 2 me they rly make my day im heart emojis
> 
> i know i been doin a bunch of oc heavy chapters lately but once moira n genji get introduced itl be easier 2 do shit w that so.. soon........soon


	28. ANOTHER SURVEY!! THIS ONES IMPORTANT

hey guys!! i kno ive been terrible about update schedules for the last like 8 months BUT that should hopefully change soon!! im finally done with school and should have more time to do things for fun again!! 

which brings me 2 the BIG QUESTION:: GENJI

mcbeans is supposed to end within a few chapters right before genji shows up,, which is going to be in another series!! (mostly because 27++ chapters is pretty intimidating when theres no mushy romance to keep a lot of readers engaged) but the question for me is

is the POV going to stay between jesse n gabe? should it switch to jesse n genji? should it just be jesse? what are your thoughts!!!!!

and as for mcbeans, what else do you want to see?? what things could/should be explored more? (the talon storyline n jesses folks r gonna b a part of the second half o course) what dumb name should i give the second part and the series itself?? what suggestions do you have for the writing i do in the future? your guys' input is one of my absolute favorite things and it really helps me improve! sorry for not giving yall the big update u deserve after the wait, but i just wanted 2 kno what youre thinkin!! i swear ive been waitin for The Genji Chapter forever its gonna be a doozie,,, i promise itll be (hopefully) worth the wait

also, im mad impatient, so the second part is prolly gonna start before i finish mcbeans, because, uh, i love, uh, genji, uh, A Fockening Lot

**Author's Note:**

> h ey if i can fix any formatting r if yall got any suggestions id welcome em


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